The Heart Monitor app is by far the coolest app I have seen to date.  It doesn’t do anything extraordinary but like the Level app it does something the iPhone was NEVER intended to do… and very well at that.

I personally am ill much of the time so the fact that there was an app that could monitor your heart rate seemed somewhat useful to me.  So I downloaded it not really expecting it to work very well but was going to give it a fighting chance.  So I start up the app and read through the prompts telling me that you can put the phone on your chest, your wrist, or the best method is to use the headphones and put the mic on your neck.  I choose to use the headphones because they claimed to get the best result.   So I plug up my headphones and turn on my “real” heart rate/O2 monitor that I have to monitor myself when I am sick and prepare to not be amazed…

To my suprise it WORKS!  Astoundingly well!  It will monitor your heart rate and tell you when the strength of the beat is strong so it can do its thing and then after a few seconds gives you an output.  The BPM was always within a few beats from the monitor!  Now can’t you just see your doctor taking your heart rate with an iPhone?  That would be amazing!  Not only does the app do that, it records your previous readings in a log and allows you to do a manual heart rate by telling you when to start/stop counting your heart rate and compare it to a chart.  The whole thing is very amazing to say the least!  Honestly I am not sure who to thank more, the developers of the app, or Apple for the fact that the iPhone headphones can be that sensitive!

As a side note to anyone wondering I did try the other methods by my wrist and my chest and neither method worked well at all.  So when they say to use the headphones it is definitely a good idea!