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Your heart rate through a game of badminton

Ongoing studyMatch play, recorded through full games

This is an ongoing study. The figure will be updated here as more people are recorded.

OPTICAL

Accuracy

85.4%

Badminton Heart Rate Agreement

measured against an ECG chest strap through the same games

Reference standard

ECG chest strap

Sample size

4 participants

Through badminton match play the Ultrahuman Ring reads within eighteen beats a minute of an ECG chest strap, on average — the hardest activity on this page for anything worn on the hand.

Ultrahuman RingECG chest strapbeats per minute
85.4%agreement with the chest strap
17.2 bpmaverage difference
36%of readings inside the ±5 bpm / 10% tolerance
86–155beats per minute the reference covered in study
Figure 1 — One continuous stretch from a single recording. The figures beside it are for the study as a whole, not for the stretch drawn.
-60-40-200+208090100110120130140upper limit of agreement (+20.5)lower limit of agreement (-39)average offset -9.2 bpmthe two devices averaged (beats per minute)ring minus chest strap (beats per minute)
Figure 2 — Every five seconds, against the chest strap
One dot is one paired five-second reading, as recorded, pooled across recordings.

A badminton swing is the sharpest acceleration and deceleration of anything measured here. The racquet head travels faster than in any other racquet sport, your grip tightens hard at the moment of contact, and both of those arrive at the sensor at once — the movement it has to see through, and the pressure that limits what it can see at all.

Through play the ring reads low against the chest strap, which is the direction the mechanics predict: a grip that tightens on the vessels the sensor reads through takes beats off a reading rather than adding them. It is what the sport does to optical heart rate.

The figure here comes from full games of match play.