heart rate monitors

Monitor

by Loonylil - 2017-01-21 15:38:27

Hi

i had a wrist monitor and dr advised me that any reading would be inaccurate as the pacemaker will interfere with it, so I haven't bothered with it since. I don't know if anyone else has experienced this? But keep exercising and good luck ❤

toys

by Tracey_E - 2017-01-21 19:10:01

They don't work for me either. Either the pacer intereferes and keeps it from reading, or it picks up the beats as well as the pacing spikes so it comes up way too fast. It won't do any harm, but it's not going to be accurate, either. 

Fitness

by Hamsquatch - 2017-01-22 03:42:04

Gym monitors never work for me either, I had pretty good success with the Wahoo TICKR chest strap, fairly accurate read a VT within 6bpm. Unfortunately it seems to be on the fritz so I'm not tracking for now, very annoying to troubleshoot.

Heart Rate Monitors

by SteveE - 2017-01-22 12:58:06

I'm now on my second pacemaker, and I'm a 5 days a week gym rat, so I needed a monitor that would work dependably.  With my first pacemaker, I was able to use a Polar chest-strap model fairly well.  The gym equipment even read the chest strap, even without the wrist reader.  But I got tired of the strap.

I read around and eventually (about 2-3 years ago) found out about the Mio line of monitors.  These were among the first that were wrist-band only, real-time monitors.  They work by "seeing" the flow of blood through your veins in your wrist.  Then are no more accurate than any other consumer device (e.g. they calculate an average rate over some time span, not instantaneous actual rate) BUT they are dependable in working in spite of my pacemaker.  I find that the hand-grip monitors on the machines may report my rate sometimes, they often blank out.  The electronic ones are also very innaccurate for me.

The Mio products aren't cheap (about $150 USD), but they work for me.  Check it out.

Optical HR monitors

by BillH - 2017-01-23 01:18:06

There is ABSOLUTELY no reason that an optical HR monitor will not work because of a PM.

As long as you have a pulse that you can feel you the optical HR monitors has the POTENTIAL of working.

I use potential as optical HR monitors are finicky. Thinks like skin color, body fat, size & spacing of blood vessels, amount of hair and other things can make the difference between working and not working. In some case they will work on the inside of the wrist, but not the outside. In other case they will only work on one arm.

That said, for those that they work they give a good trend of HR, but they limitation. Main ones are that they are inaccurate when doing activities that causes high motion in the wrist such as weight lifting or things that cause jaring such as jogging.

Also cold weather can cause problems as there is less blood flow in the sureface.

Garmin Foreruuner 735XT

by Running Machine - 2017-01-23 17:51:11

I don't see why a pacemaker would interfere with it.  I'm wearing my Garmin right now and it seems to be working fine.  I wouldn't rely on the bpm numbers to be 100% accurate, but the range seems reasonable to me.

IWatch

by dianalcrn - 2017-01-24 12:23:20

I have an Apple iWatch and find that my heart rate seems to be fairly accurate with it.  I pace at around 60 bpm  consistently.  Yesterday I walked on the treadmill for only the second time since my PM placement on 1/9/17.  My HR did get up in the high 90's (I walked really slow for 2 miles) and the iWatch seemed to capture it.  The monitor on the treadmill did not work and I confess I was a little afraid to use it.  I never found them very accurate anyway, but I wanted to see if it agreed with the watch.  I'm happy with the iWatch HR monitor.

Diana

Polar A360

by Katja3 - 2017-01-28 14:26:12

I have Polar A360 wrist monitor tracking devise. It works smoothly without slightest problems with the pacemaker. Also it measures deep sleep time, alerts if I´m too long sitting down, etc etc. Can nothing but recommend, as in terms of price its rather competitive to many other models. Also as there are plenty of colour options for the wrist band part, and as it works also as a regular watch, its just..well it looks like a watch, shows time, and yet it tracks everything and shows pulse. Perfect combination.

HR monitoring

by fourkids - 2017-03-05 15:17:33

I have both wrist based and chest strap based HR monitors.  For me the wrist based work OK but at any instant in time could be reading 30 bpm HIGH or 30 bpm LOW.  The average works out to be pretty close to my chest strap.  My chest strap always matches within a beat or two what I get from timing my own pulse.

Garmin Fenix 3hr

by Gman31 - 2017-04-14 05:31:09

I have a Garmin Fenix 3 hr that is an optical heart rate monitor watch and seems to be fairly accurate.  

iwatch HR Monitor with dual chamber pacemaker

by asully - 2018-11-14 17:25:14

I wear an Apple watch and it does a ok job 50 percent of the time.  My problem is that it often misses beats when my HR is fast for some reason, a packer tech explain Ed it to me once but I forgot the reason.  But basically it only picks up half of my beats sometimes, this leads to false Brady readings I know are impossible being 100 percent paced.  He told me just double the number if it seems wrong.  Anyone else heard of this? Also those of us with weak peripheral pulses will have a hard time with pulses taken on the extremities.  I have heard that the chest ones are better but haven't tried.  Even the machines that do vitals at doc's offices are often wrong, and someone unfamiliar with pacemakers can even misread pacing spikes on a fancy monitor.