Recent advancement in wearable technologies, particularly smart watches embedded with powerful processors,
memory subsystems with various built-in sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope and optical sensor in one single package
has opened a whole new application space. One of the main
applications of interest is the monitoring of movement patterns,
heart rate, ECG and PPG particularly for longer duration’s in
natural environments. In this study, we conducted a performance
evaluation on the optical heart rate sensor of the smartwatch with
respect to the commonly used ECG and PPG devices. Results
have shown that the heart rate acquired from the smartwatch is
reasonably accurate with a high degree of correlation. Further,
we conducted a preliminary exerise to evaluate sleep quality using
the heart rate readings and accelerometer readings captured from
the smartwatch and compared with a commercially available and
clinically used non-contact sleep sensor, RESMED S+.