Apple Watch’s Heart Rate Sensor Matches with Mio’s Alpha Monitor

apple figures out that ink, pattern, and saturation” of some tattoos can make it “difficult to get reliable readings

Mac and iOS developer Brad Larson recently drafted a graph from the raw data derived after HealthKit had a recent run with both the Apple Watch and Mio’s dedicated Alpha monitor. The graph was shared on the internet and as it appears, the most peaks were generated by Alpha which goes on to suggest that it simple has more filtering on the watch but apart from this, other factors remained the same on both the devices.

Both these wearables have optical sensors which have the ability to measure light which can then gauge the blood flow. According to Larson’s findings, the sensor on the Watch takes merely 5 seconds when it is entered into the workout mode and when it is being used regularly, it switches to one every ten minutes.

Apple was having slight issues with the sensor when it figured that its Watch would probably not work perfectly well for those users with wrist tattoos. Following this, the company had to make changes to its support page which now stated that the “ink, pattern, and saturation” of some tattoos can make it “difficult to get reliable readings.”

There have been instances in which people have reported that they were not able to use their Watch with wrist detection activated. One major drawback is that turning off this feature is also going to disable the Apple Pay as well as the heart sensor.

Extracted the raw Apple Watch HealthKit heartrate samples after a run and compared it to an HR monitor I had on: pic.twitter.com/2Ycj49Ctjt— Brad Larson (@bradlarson) /4/7, 2015