Your heart rate on a cross-trainer

Name: Your heart rate on a cross-trainer
Creator: Ultrahuman

Ongoing studyCross-trainer, hands on the fixed handles

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

OPTICAL

Accuracy

90.4%

Elliptical Heart Rate Agreement

read alongside an ECG chest strap at the same machine

Reference standard

ECG chest strap

Sample size

4 participants

With the hands on the fixed handles of a cross-trainer, the Ultrahuman Ring reads within fourteen beats a minute of an ECG chest strap, on average.

Ultrahuman RingECG chest strapbeats per minute

90.4%agreement with the chest strap

13.1 bpmaverage difference

65%of readings inside the ±5 bpm / 10% tolerance

76–172beats 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.

Figure 2 — Every five seconds, against the chest strap

One dot is one paired five-second reading, as recorded, pooled across recordings.

An elliptical is really two machines, and this figure is for one of them: the hands resting on the fixed grips, where it behaves like an indoor bike — quiet, steady, easy to read. Driving the moving levers is the other machine and a separate measurement problem, closer to rowing, with the arms pushing and pulling at almost exactly the rhythm a pulse would have.

Even on the fixed grips the hands are never quite still: the frame carries the stride back up through the arms, so a sensor reading from a finger is working through a vibration a bike never sends it.

Which is why this card lands where the two cycling cards do rather than above them. A cross-trainer is no easier to read than a bike.

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Your heart rate on a cross-trainer