I am looking for a good fitness tracker to start doing cardio in a more measured way.

I was interested in Polar and Oura as EU alternatives (both Finnish companies), but both send data (health data, which is sensitive according to Article 9 of the GDPR) to AWS.

Are you aware of any EU solutions, or at least non-US, Chinese, Russian, or Israeli solutions, that do not send my data to companies in those countries?

I would like to be able to organize something self-hosted, but I don’t think I’m capable of doing that yet.

  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nlEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    I have “looked it up” and I have designed medical PPG devices professionally also. They absolutely do not “estimate” your heart rate any more than holding your finger to your wrist and counting your heart beats in a minute. That is also “estimation” just like literally all physical measurements that are measured for less than t=infinity are.

    Of course, there are manufacturers and models that do it badly, especially during weightlifting or heavy flexion/high wrist impact activities.

    1 lead ECG can also very very reliably measure your heart rate even during and that is what chest straps like the Polar H10 do in a variety of exercises.

    Here is a good overview of fitness watch PPG testing in a variety of scenarios and how it correlates to 1 lead ECG. This guy does tons and tons of extended tests. I just chose a recent one that has recent devices. Even sleep cycle recognition in modern smart watches is getting better and better correlation to EEG, which this guy also tests sometimes.

    Stress, recovery times, VO2max, etc… All of the “1 degree removed” statistics are generally a loose educated guess and generally crap.

    Heart rate, HRV, skin temperature, speed with GPS + IMUs, and to a certain extent relative activity intensity can be directly measured and are not a guess if the device is designed and tested well (which admittedly, only like 10% of devices are)

    Blood pressure measurements using the principle of delay between electrical signals and pressure wave elasticity is also being FDA certified right now as accurate to a certain percentage of medical pressure cuffs.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      if the device is designed and tested well (which admittedly, only like 10% of devices are)

      Pretty condescending post only for you to “admit” that the overwhelming supermajority of products on the market are badly designed. And then to agree with me that the information they extrapolate is “crap”, too.

      Did you know that virtually all runners are using tech from that 90% crap category? That’s also who my post aimed at. You know, the people currently being scammed by these marketing companies, not people with the specific medical grade equipment you personally designed.

      Thank you, nonetheless, for the interesting info and further reading. Hopefully it will help steer people towards good equipment if they do decide they want to track these metrics as accurately as possible