ReviewNPJ digital medicine2020
Guidelines for wrist-worn consumer wearable assessment of heart rate in biobehavioral research.
Review in NPJ digital medicine, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 104 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
104 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Association Between Digital Biomarkers of Health and Anxiety: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Pooled it
- Impact of Skin Pigmentation on Pulse Oximetry Blood Oxygenation and Wearable Pulse Rate Accuracy: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Pooled it
- Publication guidelines for human heart rate and heart rate variability studies in psychophysiology-Part 1: Physiological underpinnings and foundations of measurement.Psychophysiology · 2024Guideline
- Remote monitoring technologies for measuring cardiovascular functions in community-dwelling adults: a systematic review.GeroScience · 2023Pooled it
- Recommendations for determining the validity of consumer wearable heart rate devices: expert statement and checklist of the INTERLIVE Network.British journal of sports medicine · 2021Guideline
- Accuracy and Systematic Biases of Heart Rate Measurements by Consumer-Grade Fitness Trackers in Postoperative Patients: Prospective Clinical Trial.Journal of medical Internet research · 2022Trial
- Guidelines for rigor and reproducibility of heart rate variability within human cardiovascular research.American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology · 2026Review
- HEART-Watch: A multimodal physiological dataset from a Google Pixel Watch across different physical states.PLOS digital health · 2026Article
- Nonlinear Relations Between Resting Heart Rate Measures and Health Risk Behavior in Emerging Adulthood.Journal of adolescence · 2026Article
- Wearable technologies in clinical trials for drug development: trends and emerging opportunities.Nature reviews. Drug discovery · 2026Review
- Can consumer wearables support outpatient health monitoring for patients with post-acute infection syndromes? A systematic umbrella review of accuracy, validity, and clinical utility data.PLOS digital health · 2026Article
- Reliability and Safety of Smartwatch Blood Pressure and Oxygen Saturation Measurements in Older Adults: Instrument Validation Study.JMIR formative research · 2026Article
- Impact of Extravalvular Remodeling on Wearable Smartwatch-Recorded Physical Activity in Patients Undergoing Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation for Severe Symptomatic Aortic Stenosis.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2026Article
- Digital physiological biomarkers predict within-person symptom changes in complex chronic illness.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Cardiac synchrony, peer relationships, and affective experiences in children during group interactions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Are you afraid? Neurophysiological responses to multidimensional fear in an interactive semi-immersive environment.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- Accuracy of wearable smartwatch for measuring blood pressure and oxygen saturation across a wide altitudinal gradient: a comparative study in Migrant and Resident populations.Frontiers in physiology · 2026Article
- Cross-wavelet analysis allows obtaining high temporal and frequency resolution in heart rate synchrony analysis.Frontiers in network physiology · 2026Article
- Predicting Minute Ventilation from Heart Rate in Adolescents: A Tool for Environmental Health Studies.Environments (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
44 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Researchers have increasingly begun to use consumer wearables or wrist-worn smartwatches and fitness monitors for measurement of cardiovascular psychophysiological processes related to mental and physical health outcomes. These devices have strong appeal because they allow for continuous, scalable, unobtrusive, and ecologically valid data collection of cardiac activity in "big data" studies. However, replicability and reproducibility may be hampered moving forward due to the lack of standardization of data collection and processing procedures, and inconsistent reporting of technological factors (e.g., device type, firmware versions, and sampling rate), biobehavioral variables (e.g., body mass index, wrist dominance and circumference), and participant demographic characteristics, such as skin tone, that may influence heart rate measurement. These limitations introduce unnecessary noise into measurement, which can cloud interpretation and generalizability of findings. This paper provides a brief overview of research using commercial wearable devices to measure heart rate, reviews literature on device accuracy, and outlines the challenges that non-standardized reporting pose for the field. We also discuss study design, technological, biobehavioral, and demographic factors that can impact the accuracy of the passive sensing of heart rate measurements, and provide guidelines and corresponding checklist handouts for future study data collection and design, data cleaning and processing, analysis, and reporting that may help ameliorate some of these barriers and inconsistencies in the literature.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.