The best way check your heart health, according to scientists
Scientists have discovered a formula that could change how heart disease is detected
A team of scientists have developed a new way to measure heart health, which could trump heart rate or step count as a measure of cardiovascular fitness.
According to new research, smartwatches could be the best way to monitor your heart health. Researchers believe the data collected by wearable devices could provide a more accurate indicator of heart vitality and could help to identify people at higher risk of heart disease.
A team of American scientists have revealed that calculating a person's heart rate per step they take, using smartwatch data, could be a better predictor of heart health than either heart rate or daily step count alone.
Study lead author Zhanlin Chen said: “The metric we developed looks at how the heart responds to exercise, rather than exercise itself. It’s a more meaningful metric because it gets at the core issue of capturing the heart’s capacity to adjust under stress as physical activity fluctuates throughout the day.
"Our metric is a first attempt at capturing that with a wearable device.”
The team looked at data from more than 6,000 American adults from their Fitbit and electronic health records. In total, the data totaled 5.8 million days and 51 billion total steps.
The team divided average daily heart rate by the number of steps taken per day to generate a figure for a person's average daily heart rate per step (DHRPS). They compared this to participants' cardiovascular health data.
Compared to people with lower DHRPS, they found that participants with higher DHRPS were around twice as likely to have Type 2 diabetes, 1.7 times more likely to have heart failure, 1.6 times more likely to have high blood pressure and 1.4 times more likely to have coronary atherosclerosis, a build-up of plaque in the heart’s arteries.
The researchers also noted that DHRPS was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than daily heart rate or step count alone. However, the study found no relationship between DHRPS and the risk of a stroke or heart attack.
The authors suggest that this metric could be used as an early predictor of heart problems, highlighting people who might benefit from screening tests or cardiovascular exercise.
Chen, a medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, says a person could easily calculate their own DHRPS using data collected by smartwatches.
He added: “Wearables are welcomed by the consumer and worn throughout the day, so they actually have minute-to-minute information about the heart function. That is a lot of information that can tell us about a lot of things, and there’s a need to further study how this detailed information correlates with patient outcomes.”
Chen is due to present the findings of the paper, “Daily Heart Rate Per Step (DHRPS) as a New Wearables Metric Associated with Cardiovascular Disease,” at the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific session in Chicago on March 29, 2025.