Kubios HRV

★★★★★ Fantastic! I had HRV Elite for more than a year, liked it, then Elite began randomly disqualifying heart monitors like Polar because Elite wants you to buy theirs. I was using Scosche and Polar and Elite now says they are inaccurate. My physician (who is also a physiologist) says hogwash. So I quit Elite and tried Kubios. The app is nicer and the data is perfectly accurate and identical to 12-lead ECG -- using Polar Verity! Kudos to Kubios for its great HRV app!

★★★★★ Kubios is free. It gives you the raw numbers and not some invented, proprietary bs that you can never ever interpret on your own. Kubios gives you straightforward numbers that you can work with. It is a tad slow to load both the phone app and the desktop app. Unfortunately, I can’t download individual measurements from the phone app as a data file to work with using the Kubios HRV desktop app. The baseline should be user-definable. I’d prefer a baseline of the last 60 days, whereas others might prefer longer or shorter baselines. Every now and then, the phone app exits out of the blue, usually when it should be saving the readings, and you have to do a new reading. The desktop app also gives you heart rate zones based on your maximal heart rate, possibly also considering your resting heart rate. They could be a bit more transparent and actually inform users how exactly they get to those zones. I had to calculate the zones myself, which came out as follows: Zone 0 (Inactive) = < 45%; Zone 1 (Very Easy) = 46-60%; Zone 2 (Easy) = 61-70%; Zone 3 (Moderate) = 71-80%, Zone 4 (Hard) = 81-85%; Zone 5 (Maximal) = 86+%. The phone app gives you your daily readiness in four categories: Very Low, Low, Normal, and High. I have come up with my own training rule, which is as follows: If my readiness is very low, I do a Zone 1 workout. If it’s low, I do a Zone 2 workout. If it’s normal, I do a Zone 3 workout, and if it’s high, I drop the fu….. Hammer. The app is great. It wouldn’t really make sense for Kubios to make it a paid app because you can always download the free Kubios desktop app and analyze your readiness there; you would just need a watch that saves R-R intervals, which most of the modern sports watches do. I believe that the Kubios HRV app will remain free for the foreseeable future as the Kubios desktop app has always been free and can do the very same thing and a heap load of more stuff than the app.

★★☆☆☆ Gives the same HRV score every day. The HR and other values varies, but the score remains the same. You don't need the app I can tell you your score, it's 63%. Every day. Forever. Other apps may have inconsistency problems but at least they give you different results on different days. The two stars are for all the info you get to ponder about, like PNS and SNS and all the rest that probably means something to a doctor but not me. I used the Polar h10.

★★☆☆☆ Complete waste of time. So buggy. It frequently fails to load, getting stuck on the company logo. Time scaling on graphs is wrong, the line getting to a minute after about thirty seconds, then not moving until a minute is up and catching up in a big jump. But most annoying of all, analysis frequently fails. You spend three minutes measuring, another few minutes waiting for the wheel to spin, and then you're told the analysis has failed for some unknown reason.

★★☆☆☆ Falsely claims location permission is required to access Bluetooth HR sensor (no other HR app requires this). Then, trying to do a reading, it gets stuck "analyzing" forever. Then, if you try to register an account hoping that will fix the problem, it fails with an unknown error. A complete dumpster fire of an app.

★★☆☆☆ Totally confusing. Doesn't give heart rate variability reading but gives all other readings. Says it needs 6 heart rate readings which are 3 minutes long, didn't save one of them thus wasting 18 minutes of my life for no read out. App goes.!