Heart Rate Variability, Apple Watch, and iPhone 11 Pro

When Apple introduced iPhone 11 Pro, alarm bells started ringing in Wattson Blue HQ. Are we going to get a good HRV reading with 3 cameras? One camera we can handle, we kick ass with two cameras, but putting one finger on 3 camera that are not in one line starts getting a bit tricky…

Update released on 19 Sep 2019

Fear not though, we started work on a solution and quickly released an update that addresses the issue. Now depending on your version of the iPhone, you get told exactly where to put your finger. E.g. for iPhone 11 Pro you place your finger across the phone on the top camera and flash, and for iPhone 11, you put your finger on bottom camera and flash.

We already have a few users using iPhone 11s and 11 Pros to record their HRV. So happy that their experience has been completely seamless.

iPhone 11 Pro HRV recording Notice

Higher sampling frequencies on latest iPhones

Recently we also increased the sampling frequency for the HRV recording on the latest iPhones. This means we get to use all the latest magic and features imbedded in your phones to get even higher quality HRV measurements.

 

Kick-ass intern at work

Over the past month, thanks to our intern Louis, we also improved the underlying algorithm (for both iPhone and Android users) to remove artefacts and bad signals from your HRV recordings, which should make things even more accurate.

 

And finally, proper Apple Watch HRV support

Apple recently announced that they now allow developers to access raw RR-intervals from Apple Watch, which means we can accurately calculate HRV and given Apple Watch users their Wattson Blue Readiness Score!

apple health permission
Apple’s latest iOS and WatchOS release allow developers to access rr-intervals recorded via Apple Watch

All you need to do is to make sure you have iOS 13 installed on your phone, and watchOS 6 on your watch! And then wait for us to release the next version of the app!

 

So watch this space.

 

That’s it for now. Thanks for all the athletes who are using Wattson Blue to train and rest smart.

❤️

Ali and the rest of the gang

 

p.s. if you have a moment, we would really appreciate a review and rating on the App store or Google play store.