Software to plot heart rate on a PC?

February 7, 2015 9:14 AM

I can get POLAR Coded and non-Coded strap-ons that make loud TICKs at 5kHz, but how can I plot those ticks over time on a PC, instead of just having my "heart rate" show up on the watch?
posted by shipbreaker to Technology (5 answers total)

I don't have this program, but 5 kHz (5 thousand cycles per second is very fast) is a fairly high pitched tone, and would not have distinct ticks. What program are you trying to use, and what is your goal with the program?
posted by TheAdamist at 6:06 PM on February 7, 2015

Response by poster: Ya let me down, metafilter.
posted by shipbreaker at 7:52 PM on February 7, 2015

Adafruit’s Polar heatrate sensor kit references this Parallax tutorial which has example code which might give you a starting point.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 11:01 PM on February 7, 2015

I'm not really sure what the question is. Are you saying these things make audible noises and you want to detect/track them with a computer?

Does it need to be polar? Many companies make bluetooth or ANT+ HR monitors that can pair with computer devices no problem to plot heart rate in real time.

Even the Polar's I've used could pair with a Polar device and you could literally find every HR pulse from your activity on them (what they actually recorded was "time since last beat"). I have an older Polar that does that, and then can transmit the data to a PC via infrared.
posted by RustyBrooks at 11:36 AM on February 8, 2015

Do you want it to show up in real time, or are you OK with plotting it after your workout? If you want it to show up in real time, it's definitely going to be easier if you can get an ANT+ or Bluetooth band instead, there's just more non-Polar hardware available (for example, cell phone dongles for ANT+ or directly connect with Bluetooth).

If you're OK with waiting until after your workout, I have this widget and it works well with a non-coded strap. You carry it and it records everything, and then later you plug it into the computer and use its software to copy your data off. You can use the software it comes with to graph, or dump it into a general purpose spreadsheet application to do whatever analysis you want.
posted by anaelith at 5:33 PM on February 8, 2015