Ryan Howard, founder and former CEO of Practice Fusion, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the know-it-all celebrity doctor that’s always trying to sell you a miracle, have partnered to release a new heart rate monitoring smartwatch. The iBeat Life Monitor is touted to be able to detect “signs of oncoming cardiac arrest.” It supposedly is able to do this via photoplethysmography, a way of using a pulse oximeter to measure the variation of the blood volume in the distal vessels, and to extrapolate volume of blood pumped by the heart. We are a bit skeptical as this technology has its limitations, including accuracy problems during physical activity and measurements being affected by other physiological parameters such as breathing.
