Smartphones and Wearable Sensors for Monitoring Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability

Heart rate and heart rate variability have been extensively researched in clinical settings over the past decades. Nonetheless, technological developments in the past few years have dramatically changed accessibility to such data for researchers, patients, and consumers.

Smartphones and wearable sensors allow for non-invasive and continuous measurement of heart rate and heart rate variability, enabling new applications and a better understanding of human physiology in response to both physical and psychological stressors. Additionally, continuous heart rate and heart rate variability measurements collected by means of novel technological developments can serve as input for the development of algorithms estimating other relevant parameters in the context of health and fitness, for example, energy expenditure, sleep stages, and cardiorespiratory fitness.

However, only a tiny fraction of smartphone applications and wearable sensors have been validated, often leaving many questions unanswered. Issues linked to, for example, artifact detection and correction, accuracy in different populations (e.g., the relation between PPG in different body locations and skin color), and the relative contribution of heart rate and heart rate derived features in various applications (e.g., sleep stage estimation) should be addressed by the scientific community. 

In this Special Issue, you are invited to submit contributions describing the development and validation of technologies and methods to measure heart rate and heart rate variability using smartphones and wearable sensors, as well as derived applications relying on these inputs. Of particular interest are systematic evaluations of different technologies and methods aiming at measuring heart rate and heart rate variability, and derived applications. 

Dr. Marco Altini
Guest Editor

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