Abstract
Fitness trackers are devices or applications for monitoring and tracking fitness-related metrics such as distance walked or run, calorie consumption, quality of sleep and heart rate. Since accurate heart rate monitoring is essential in fitness training, the objective of this study was to assess the accuracy and precision of the Fitbit Charge 2 for measuring heart rate with respect to a gold standard electrocardiograph. Fifteen healthy participants were asked to ride a stationary bike for 10 minutes and their heart rate was simultaneously recorded from each device. Results showed that the Fitbit Charge 2 underestimates the heart rate. Although the mean bias in measuring heart rate was a modest -5.9 bpm (95% CI: -6.1 to -5.6 bpm), the limits of agreement, which indicate the precision of individual measurements, between the Fitbit Charge 2 and criterion measure were wide (+16.8 to -28.5 bpm) indicating that an individual heart rate measure could plausibly be underestimated by almost 30 bpm.
Citation: Benedetto S, Caldato C, Bazzan E, Greenwood DC, Pensabene V, Actis P (2018) Assessment of the Fitbit Charge 2 for monitoring heart rate. PLoS ONE 13(2):
e0192691.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192691
Editor: Yih-Kuen Jan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UNITED STATES
Received: August 8, 2017; Accepted: January 29, 2018; Published: February 28, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Benedetto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.
Funding: This work was supported by TSW XP Lab, which only provided financial support in the form of authors’ salaries [SB, CC, EB] and/or research materials. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the “Author Contributions” section.
Competing interests: The authors declare that the funding organization (TSW XP Lab) only provided financial support in the form of authors’ salaries [SB, CC, EB] and/or research materials, and did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the “Author Contribution” section. The authors also confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter their adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.
Description
The study evaluates the Fitbit Charge 2's heart rate monitoring accuracy.