Hactive: a smartphone application for heart rate profiling

Abstract

With advancements in popular modern wearable devices, such as Apple Watch and Fitbit, it is now possible to harness these technologies for continuous monitoring and recording of heart rate data, which can then be used for medical research and ultimately e-health applications. In this paper, we report the development of a new mobile smartphone application (app) that enables heart rate profiles to be extracted and analysed from continuous heart rate monitoring time series. The new iOS app, called Hactive, extracts heart rate data from Apple’s smartwatches to construct heart rate profiles. A key innovation is Hactive’s ability to detect and analyse exercise-associated heart rate changes from continuous heart rate data, which enables heart rate profiles to be constructed based on free-living conditions. We believe this tool advances the use of wearable technology to collect physiologically relevant big data for healthcare and medical research. The source code of Hactive is available via an MIT open source licence at https://github.com/VCCRI/hactive.