iHeart Pro

I tried using it a couple diffrent ways but the best results i found were - setting it to microphone mode and wearing headphones: 1. Using the APP "IstethPro" (99 cents i think) before hand helps a LOT A. Put the mic on your bare skin (tap the bottom to find the mic location - bottom right) B. Find your heartbeat with the iphone, and hold the it on the sides (you will notice with this program how moving your hand around causes noise. C. Push the mic hard enough into your chest to hear the beat loud and clear. D. Try to keep that position, and tap the home button. 2. Launch iHeart and start the test - you will see from the graph the pulse is loud and clear. When you use "IstethPro" practice a few times so you can see the best way to hold it and so on. I think if iHeart had the IstethPro features built in (the ability to hear what the mic hears) people would have a much easier time with it. Once you figgure out how it works its pretty easy to get a reading. Hope this helps. Three stars because of its cost vs what it takes to figgure out how to use it.

This app has both accelerometer and microphone options, but the accelerometer option is crap. The info section reveals that you used to have control over what to cut out as noise, but the setting mentioned is no longer accessible. In accelerometer mode, this is saddening -- I can create a chart where it is obvious where each heartbeat is, and the app says the signal is too weak while it reports some bogus number. I can count the peaks on the graph and multiply appropriately to get a reading similar to what the microphone mode reports. With a few updates this app could rock. Because of its current limitations including crashes while calculating from a long sample -- possibly related to the sample time being longer than my screenlock time -- it gets three stars. It can still be used to record heartrate trends over long periods and to find heartrate in certain modes. The info section should tell you what each axis is, and the axis options should be toggle buttons, not sub-menus.

This has been working okay for me, but needs an update to fix some rough edges: it crashes after navigating around in history; the accelerometer function does not work for me, but the microphone does reasonably well; it keeps saying "Low Memory" which is not true; the help text is poorly written; the red/green threshold is not configurable; data are graphed with a line instead of bars/impulses. Given that, it does mostly work.

I have tried application for about 30 times continuously and received very different results. About half of them was definitely wrong as the pulse determined was lower than 26 beats per minute. After reading an instruction I've got results which could be considered as true, but to get them I had to shake a hand with iphone each time I felt a pulse beat with another hand. Maybe there are hardware restrictions, maybe not, but I expect implementation to be improved for getting more stable results.

I have always thought that apple should add some health tracking features to the hardware but then I realized it could be done with what we have now and iHeart does it! And in the extreme case that it is just don't getting your reading it love it for the log capacity! Very useful! Great idea!