Smartwatches get got smarter.
People often rely on their smartwatches to track daily steps as a way to ensure they get enough physical activity for better health. However, recent research suggests that smartwatches might be monitoring a more crucial health indicator—average daily heart rate. A new study proposes that dividing a person’s average heart rate by the number of daily steps provides a better gauge of heart fitness than either step count or heart rate alone.
This new metric, introduced by Zhanlin Chen, a medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, focuses on how the heart responds to exercise rather than the exercise itself. Chen emphasized that it captures the heart’s ability to adjust to stress during varying levels of physical activity throughout the day, offering a more meaningful insight into heart health.
The study analyzed data from nearly 7,000 American adults who shared their Fitbit data and health records for a National Institutes of Health research program. The results showed that people whose hearts worked harder per step—meaning a higher heart rate per step—were at increased risk for conditions like type 2 diabetes, heart failure, high blood pressure, and clogged arteries. Interestingly, this new measure of heart rate per step was more strongly linked to heart disease than either daily heart rate or step count by itself.
The findings suggest that heart rate per step could be useful for identifying individuals who may benefit from additional heart health screenings or specific exercises to strengthen heart function. The metric is easy enough for people to calculate on their own, and it could potentially be incorporated into smartwatch applications in the future.
Researchers plan to explore whether tracking heart rate per step on a minute-by-minute basis, rather than across entire days, could provide even more helpful insights for doctors and patients, offering real-time information about heart performance.
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