How accurate are the HRV measurements of the Oura ring? In this video I tested that for you, and I also discuss the results from a recent scientific paper. In short the Oura ring performs much better than I expected in measuring HR at HRV at night.
I will first briefly introduce the concept of HRV and its implications. If you want to skip to the results, you can find the timestamps here:
0:00 Intro
1:28 HRV Explained
3:24 Test Explained
4:08 Results Heart Rate (examples)
5:41 Results Heart Rate (overview)
7:10 Results HRV (examples)
8:05 Results HRV (overview)
10:19 Summary/Conclusions
📹Want to find out more about the Oura ring for COVID-19 detection:📹
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📹Or the accuracy of the Oura ring for sleep prediction:📹
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Briefly, what is HRV
We all know what heart rate is: it is the number of heart beats per minute. Say your heart rate is 60 beats per minute while you are watching this video;
However, this does not mean your heart perfectly beats at one beat per second. It just means that on average there were 60 beats per minute, but the time between heart-beats varies: it might be 1.2 seconds between this beat and the next, and 0.8 seconds to the following heart beat.
What does HRV predict?
But don't worry, this variation in the time between heart beats, which is what we call heart rate variability, is actually a normal thing. In this video I won’t go into all of the details of heart rate variability, but to put it in really simple terms: a larger heart rate variability is actually better, assuming you don’t have any underlying conditions.
Stress and bad sleep quality for instance lower heart rate variability, and if you are more physically fit you tend to have a lower heart-rate and higher heart-rate variability.
So, if you track your HRV with something like the Oura ring, you can try to optimize it in both the long and short term. If you have a low HRV compared to the last days or weeks, that means you might have experienced something stressful that your body reacted to, and you might want to take it a bit slower. If you notice that your HRV has been increasing over time: good for you, you might be getting fitter.
There are also other things that HRV is associated with: as I mentioned before it can drop when you are getting sick; but also smoking, dehydration and alcohol consumption can reduce HRV, and tracking your HRV can even help you predict what exercise works best that day.
The question
Back to the Oura ring, we can only use the Oura’s HRV measurements to improve our health if they are accurate. Recently, the Oura team published this paper, claiming their HR and HRV measurements are really accurate; they did this by comparing the Oura ring to a medical grade electrocardiogram or ECG. I put this to the test by measuring my HRV with both this Polar H10 ECG chest strap and the Oura ring for several nights, and comparing the HR and HRV results.
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