I wore the AirPods Pro 3 for months before I remembered they could even track my heart rate. I remember sitting in Apple’s September keynote, when the company announced heart-rate tracking through your ears. Measuring the rate of your heartbeats from a pair of earbuds sounded futuristic, and the announcement drew one of the loudest rounds of applause of the keynote. Then I got home and went right back to recording every workout with my Apple Watch. There wasn’t much reason to change. The Apple Watch Series 11 beat out every smartwatch I tested in our CNET Labs heart-rate comparisons against a Polar chest strap (designed explicitly to track heart rate), so I wasn’t expecting a pair of earbuds to come anywhere close. Spoiler: They did. The Apple Watch Series 11 still takes the crown for heart rate accuracy, but if I’d included the AirPods Pro 3 in my previous comparisons, they would’ve beaten out every other smartwatch on my list. The Apple Watch is our top-rated smartwatch for heart-rate tracking. raditya/Getty Images Health tracking moves beyond the wrist Consumer health tracking started on the wrist, but it isn’t staying there. Fitness trackers and smartwatches have made 24/7 heart-rate monitoring mainstream to aid in training and recovery. They’ve since evolved to almost clinical level of precision to help flag serious heart conditions, sleep issues and even alert emergency services with features like loss of pulse detection (on the Pixel Watch ). Now we’re seeing similar sensors in smartrings, earbuds, smart earrings and soon even smart glasses that can do the same from different parts of your body. Where we’ll eventually wear our primary health tracker is still an open question. But to answer that, every new location has to prove it can measure those same health signals as accurately as the wrist. Wearables like the earbuds and smart rings are tracking vitals beyond the wrist. Vanessa Hand Orellana/Jeffrey Hazelwood/CNET Why your ear might be a better place to measure heart rate While tracking heart rate from earbuds is novel, I wasn’t starting this comparison from scratch. A few months earlier, Whoop’s now-infamous “thong” accessory (yes, the fitness company really makes performance underwear that lets you wear its sensor on your waist and other locations) sent me down a rabbit hole . I interviewed physicians and wearable experts about whether different parts of the body are better suited for measuring different health signals. The answer depends on what you’re measuring. Fingertips, for example, work well for blood oxygen because they’re packed with small blood vessels, and thinner skin lets more light pass through. Heart rate is different. In general, the closer a sensor sits to the heart (and the less that body part moves during exercise), the easier it is for a sensor-equipped device to capture a clean signal. That gives the ear a couple of advantages over the wrist. It’s slightly closer to the heart and stays relatively stable while you run. But location is only part of the equation. Apple has spent more than a decade refining the Apple Watch’s heart-rate algorithms. In my previous CNET Labs testing against a Polar H10 chest strap, the Apple Watch Series 11 averaged less than a 1% error rate, making it the most accurate smartwatch I’ve tested to date. The AirPods have different hardware and space constraints. Apple says it built its smallest-ever heart-rate sensor to fit inside the tiny buds and trained it on more than 50 million hours of Apple Health Study data. But this is still new territory. The question isn’t whether earbuds can measure heart rate, it’s whether they can come close to the Apple Watch. How I tested the AirPods Pro 3 against the Apple Watch For every wearable I’ve tested, I use the same benchmark: the Polar H10 chest strap (CNET’s gold standard in consumer HR tracking). Unlike an Apple Watch or AirPods, which estimate heart rate by shining light into your skin and measuring changes in blood flow, t
Sumber: CNET