Consumer wearable devices provide continuous tracking of vital signs and advanced health metrics, but require careful interpretation due to proprietary algorithms and differences among manufacturers.
This review provides a critical analysis of health metrics from consumer wearable devices, offering recommendations for interpretation and highlighting disparities in their use.
The use of consumer wearable devices (CWDs) to track health and fitness has rapidly expanded over recent years because of advances in technology. The general population now has the capability to continuously track vital signs, exercise output, and advanced health metrics. Although understanding of basic health metrics may be intuitive (eg, peak heart rate), more complex metrics are derived from proprietary algorithms, differ among device manufacturers, and may not historically be common in clinical practice (eg, peak V.O2, exercise recovery scores). With the massive expansion of data collected at an individual patient level, careful interpretation is imperative. In this review, we critically analyze common health metrics provided by CWDs, describe common pitfalls in CWD interpretation, provide recommendations for the interpretation of abnormal results, present the utility of CWDs in exercise prescription, examine health disparities and inequities in CWD use and development, and present future directions for research and development.
Petek et al. (Sat,) conducted a review in Cardiovascular health and fitness tracking. Consumer wearable devices (CWDs) was evaluated. Consumer wearable devices provide continuous tracking of vital signs and advanced health metrics, but require careful interpretation due to proprietary algorithms and differences among manufacturers.