Pulse oximeter- smart watch?
Discussion
Here is ray, from this post
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/04/garmin-forerun...
“With the addition of Pulse OX last summer to the Fenix 5X Plus, we’ve seen Garmin add it to numerous other wearables. The idea behind pulse oximetry tracking is mostly around high altitude tracking. Though it’s often used in hospitals on most patients as well. Still, the focus here is high altitude tracking for mountain climbing and such. Practically speaking for those of us at sea level, it’s mostly a useless stat. Again, remember Pulse OX is the red light that comes on next to the green lights on the back of the unit, and typically tracks in 15-minute increments if enabled, and is overlaid against your altitude:
The challenge here with Pulse Ox is really around accuracy. In the case of a typical medical grade pulse oximetry device, that medical certification is done with the person sitting in a chair very still. The FDA acceptable tolerances are actually surprisingly low (as in, easy), at least compared to what I’d consider acceptable even for sport tracking of heart rate accuracy for example. So you take technology that’s really designed to be done when very still and try to apply it to everyday life and you get oddities. That manifests itself in the readings you get. You’ll see below that my readings are a bit all over the place. For someone like me at exactly sea level, I should be in the 98%+ range almost the entire time.
The challenge is that this is taking readings all day long (not by default, but because I enabled it that way), and some of those are inaccurate. Ideally this technology would be leveraged on the side of a mountain and manually triggered to determine your current state. In that scenario – it’s likely to produce just as good results as any other unit on the market, medical grade or otherwise. Running around town at the grocery store? A bit less so.”
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/04/garmin-forerun...
“With the addition of Pulse OX last summer to the Fenix 5X Plus, we’ve seen Garmin add it to numerous other wearables. The idea behind pulse oximetry tracking is mostly around high altitude tracking. Though it’s often used in hospitals on most patients as well. Still, the focus here is high altitude tracking for mountain climbing and such. Practically speaking for those of us at sea level, it’s mostly a useless stat. Again, remember Pulse OX is the red light that comes on next to the green lights on the back of the unit, and typically tracks in 15-minute increments if enabled, and is overlaid against your altitude:
The challenge here with Pulse Ox is really around accuracy. In the case of a typical medical grade pulse oximetry device, that medical certification is done with the person sitting in a chair very still. The FDA acceptable tolerances are actually surprisingly low (as in, easy), at least compared to what I’d consider acceptable even for sport tracking of heart rate accuracy for example. So you take technology that’s really designed to be done when very still and try to apply it to everyday life and you get oddities. That manifests itself in the readings you get. You’ll see below that my readings are a bit all over the place. For someone like me at exactly sea level, I should be in the 98%+ range almost the entire time.
The challenge is that this is taking readings all day long (not by default, but because I enabled it that way), and some of those are inaccurate. Ideally this technology would be leveraged on the side of a mountain and manually triggered to determine your current state. In that scenario – it’s likely to produce just as good results as any other unit on the market, medical grade or otherwise. Running around town at the grocery store? A bit less so.”
kurt535 said:
can i ask why you want a pulse ox in a watch?
My partners son could actually make use of it - he's a double lung transplant recipient, and having semi regular checks on his spo2 could be useful. I briefly considered it as "useful" for myself, but figure that the fingertip sensor is good enough for me.There's a use case for it after exercise, to see if your levels have dropped, but that's about it.
clonmult said:
kurt535 said:
can i ask why you want a pulse ox in a watch?
My partners son could actually make use of it - he's a double lung transplant recipient, and having semi regular checks on his spo2 could be useful. I briefly considered it as "useful" for myself, but figure that the fingertip sensor is good enough for me.There's a use case for it after exercise, to see if your levels have dropped, but that's about it.
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