Overnight or Long Term Readings on Elite HRV
The Elite HRV app is not designed for overnight or 24-hour continuous HRV tracking.
If you are looking for extra long-duration measurements, then consider wearables that specialize in taking random bursts of readings throughout the day. The Elite HRV app has not been designed to track HRV continuously for longer than one hour.
If the outcome you are looking for is ongoing health, wellness, and stress management, then short-duration measurements trended over time or compared pre/post-event have advantages. This is the area that we've targeted. These two methodologies cannot be compared side by side. Please see this article for additional points: HRV Score Different Than Other Apps
The Elite HRV app is intended to provide HRV insights from short, regular, routine readings taken daily. This is discussed further down in this article.
Due to heavy server demand, we cannot currently process readings longer than 1 hour. Readings longer than 30 minutes may take several hours to process. If you are determined to take longer duration readings (i.e, longer than an hour), there are several considerations you need to be aware of in advance:
- Your HRV monitor must be able to stay on you for extended periods without picking up movement artifacts. A chest strap monitor is currently the best option for this, however, steps must still be taken to avoid artifacts.
- Whether during sleep or throughout the day, it is important to make sure the chest strap does not pick up too many signal artifacts. This can be achieved by ensuring that it is adequately tight around the chest and using strap gel (link)
- Longer readings (greater than 30 minutes) require a lot of processing power to detect and correct artifacts and to generate frequency domain values, our app is not set up for these longer readings. These readings will be processed in the background and results will be displayed after processing. It may take several hours to process. Additionally, if the reading is longer than a few hours in duration, it could take days to process or not process at all.
- Certain phones close apps that run in the background. If you find your phone closes the Elite HRV app after a while, then a “night clock” app can help alleviate this. Night clock apps keep the phone’s screen awake while consuming minimal power. Users have reported that this allows Elite HRV to continue reading for long periods without disconnecting.
Example apps that can keep the screen awake:
- (Android) Night Alarm Clock
- (iOS) Night Time Clock
If your reading does get disconnected, all data up to the point of disconnection is automatically saved locally on your phone or tablet. You will need to “sync” the Elite HRV app for the reading to be saved – at which point you can then add notes/tags to the reading as well.
To sync the Elite HRV, pull down with your finger on the Home screen of the app until you see a Loading or Syncing icon.
Please note that readings longer than 20 minutes will not have the High Frequency peak calculated due to the processing power it requires. Additionally, PDF reports are only available on our Dashboard for readings 20 minutes or less.
24/7 readings (typically from wearables) can be interesting if the data is appropriately analyzed. Please note that we are not aware of a currently available wearable that actually measures HRV constantly throughout the day and night. Most will take random bursts of HRV measurement However, we do not recommend the use of 24/7 wearables for a few reasons.
- Wrist-worn devices tend to be sensitive to movement artifacts, and you can't prevent these from happening if your wearable is taking readings sporadically throughout the day.
- Regarding context (even while wearing a chest strap), your HRV is sensitive to stressors that you may experience throughout the day. HRV itself changes naturally throughout the day, which further complicates the analysis.
- Instead, we have repeatedly found that 90%+ of the insights can be derived from consistent morning "rapid" readings, which are not affected by the same errors or "noise".