Instant Heart Rate

Instant Heart Rate Review

by on September 23, 2010

It’s a well known fact that technology journalists are heartless beings whose desire to have the latest devices overcomes everything else in life, so we weren’t quite sure if the Instant Heart Rate app would work for us.

But after spending a good few hours looking up pictures of kittens and re-learning what this thing called life is about we felt a slight flutter in our chest cavity – enough to believe that an app like Instant Heart Rate would yield results.

After a quick read of the picture-led instructions, we have to say that Instant Heart Rate is one of the simplest apps to use we’ve seen for Android.

All you have to do is load it up, place your finger in front of the camera lens on your Android handset and wait for 10 seconds.

Once done your heart rate is shown in numbers and it seems to be pretty darn accurate. We tried it in the morning after a good night’s sleep and the monitor said we had a heart rate of between 67 and 69.

After going for a run – the first in a very long time – the monitor showed a rate of 110, which is well between the 96-162 beats for our age.

The accuracy of the app is said to come from how the heart rate is measured. Essentially, it works the same as a medical pulse oximeter, which looks at the colour of the skin when your blood is oxygenated and when it isn’t and then determines your heart rate from this ‘pulse’.

In this case, the technology is far less advanced, but the phone’s camera – helped by the flash or a very well-lit room – does take a similar reading of the colour of your skin and reports back the results.

For a free app and one which is used when exercising and not in a medical capacity, the Instant Heart Rate monitor is something of a gem.

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