Are you f**** kidding me! Stop with that misinformation. This is not true. First of all - IT IS NOT ONLY GARMIN. EVERY OTHER SMARTWATCH WITH HRV MEASURE FUNCTIONALITY IS LIKE THAT. Secondly: HRV is not an absolute value metric. It should aways be taken as a relative measure. There are no two persons with the same HRV base.
A real study would be not a comparison with a different grade device but how a certain device perform in different situations and thus if the relative values that it produces are in relation with reality.
Oh and by the way... Garmin measure HRV only in rest or sleep....
I mean this article alone discredit your whole website and information in it. Sorry but from now on you are in my black list of authors that basically just blindly copy paste information and produces click baits!
Important distinction: wrist-based HRV relies on photoplethysmography (PPG), which estimates inter-beat intervals from blood flow rather than directly measuring cardiac electrical activity like ECG. That inevitably introduces more noise and wider margins of error, particularly during motion, and Garmin devices are primarily designed as activity wearables.
However, under low-movement conditions (especially overnight), PPG-based HRV can still provide meaningful longitudinal trends. For most users, trend tracking is arguably more relevant than absolute ECG-level precision.
It's also worth noting that the study appears to have tested an older Vivosmart 4 using Garmin's Elevate Gen 3 sensor. Newer Garmin devices use later-generation sensors and updated algorithms, which may perform differently.
A study suggests that at least one Garmin smartwatch cannot estimate a health metric with high accuracy when compared with professional equipment. Specifically, the Garmin Vivosmart 4 did not perform well in this recent test.
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