Heart Rate: What’s Normal and How Trends Relate to Health Status

What is it?

Heart rate is defined as the number of contractions of the heart, expressed in beats per minute (bpm). The heart rate is a function of local electrical signals in the cardiac cells, neural inputs, and hormonal influence.

Heart rate changes in response to stressors in order to increase circulation of blood, often by increasing cardiac output. This increase in cardiac output helps meet the demands of physiological responses to stress.

Therefore, heart rate can be a valuable metric in understanding the cumulative stress (e.g. emotional and physical stress) that is placed on the body.

How it’s measured

Heart rate can be measured through palpation, electrocardiography (ECG), and photoplethysmography (PPG). Biostrap measures heart rate using PPG, which captures pulse waves of blood flow using red and infrared light. By using the count of pulse waves per unit of time, heart rate in bpm can be obtained.

Heart rate can be measured during activity (active heart rate). However, resting heart rate (RHR) is most often used to clinically assess cardiovascular health, since extra stress on the cardiovascular system is absent. RHR can be subject to acute stress, including observation bias. Therefore, passive collection of RHR through wearables, particularly during sleep, allows for minimizing error that may artificially raise RHR.

Correlation with health conditions

Chronically increased resting heart rate has been correlated with many diseases and their outcomes, particularly hypertension, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and metabolic disorders, among others. In many cases, the increased heart rate is not itself a contributor to the disease progression, but rather a signal that there are down-stream effects of the underlying disease.

Acutely increased resting heart rate may be an indication of altered blood flow, reduced plasma volume, psychological stress, activity, infection, and thermal stress. Monitoring heart rate trends can alert when heart rate has changed acutely, but may not be indicative of the cause of the increase. In times where no change in RHR is expected such as during sleep, follow-up evaluation may be warranted.

What is a “normal” range?

<60 bpm = Bradycardia
60-100 bpm = “Normal”
>100 = Tachycardia

A “normal” RHR is considered to be 60-100 beats per minute. Factors that may influence resting heart rate values include:

• Fitness level
• Room temperature
• Body position
• Emotional stress
• Body size and/or composition
• Use of medications

Interpreting trends

Resting heart rate, measured over time, provides insights into cardiovascular changes in response to lifestyle or disease progression. Since RHR responds relatively quickly to lifestyle changes, tracking resting heart rate over time is recommended in order to monitor positive and negative health adaptations.

Although RHR alone is not enough to diagnose any particular disease, the American Heart Association recommends lowering resting heart rate as much as possible. Exercise training, dietary changes, meditation, and reducing stress are examples of ways to reduce RHR. The decrease in heart rate reflects increased cardiovascular efficiency and decreased systemic stress.

Increases in RHR over time could be an indication of negative cardiovascular changes, and may warrant follow-up testing or lifestyle intervention.

Biostrap

In a clinical study, the Biostrap PPG-based resting heart rate measurement matched within 1 +/- BPM to the reference research grade ECG.

In a small real-world cohort of elderly people, the standalone Fibricheck AF algorithm can accurately detect AF using Wavelet wristband-derived PPG data. Results are comparable to the Alivecor Kardia one-lead ECG device, with an acceptable unclassifiable/bad quality rate. This opens the door for long-term AF screening and monitoring.

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