I’m helping a friend choose a wearable health monitor. We are simply going by lists of features such as HRV, body battery, sleep quality, blood oxygen levels, etc. But I’ve read that some of these features are so unreliable that they are best ignored.
So my question is, in our list of features, are there any we should ignore?
They want to monitor as much as possible. They’re in very good health: a nutritionist who meditates, practises psychotherapy, runs twice weekly and does kettle bells twice weekly.
I’m lending them my Garmin Vivoactive 5. It does quite a bit already, although I find the apps around these things so tedious that I’ll probably stop using them personally.
I have a garmin Mk2i which I primarily bought for scuba diving, but it includes all their other fitness stuff. I find the pulse ox and heart rate monitors to be wrong often enough to be useless (checked vs an actual finger pulse-ox meter and vs my chest strap on my treadmill). The heart rate meter will constantly cadence-lock when jogging or running, too. So my recommendation would be don’t buy a Garmin for those things.
The scuba functions and pool swim / lap counter functions are great and I love it for those. It’s also very cool to see how and where I did runs on the mountain when skiing with the built in gps and maps, although again I have found Ski Tracks on an iPhone to be much more accurate for ski distance, vert, and speed tracking.
That is very, very helpful. Thank you so much! I think that will help them reassess which device they chose, or if a wearable is even the right path.