We have more information than ever at our fingertips thanks to smartwatches. But in case you need just a little bit more incentivizing, scientists now say that smartwatches and activity trackers can predict your risk of developing cardiovascular disease. It turns out that knowing your heart rate or daily step count alone isn’t enough. Keep reading to find out why.
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A new study classifies how to measure cardiovascular health via a smartwatch.
For a century, heart disease has been the leading cause of death among U.S. adults, per the American Heart Association (AHA). In 2021, more people died from heart disease and stroke than chronic lower respiratory disease and all cancers combined. Additionally, nearly half of Americans have high blood pressure—and 38 percent of people don’t even know it.
The good news is that smartwatches could help bridge the gap in this lack of awareness when it comes to heart health.
A new study found that the No. 1 way to monitor your heart is by dividing your average daily heart rate by your daily steps (all data readily available via a wearable fitness tracker). This equation, called Daily Heart Rate Per Step (DHRPS), gives a better idea of your overall cardiovascular fitness than heart rate or step count alone.
"The metric we developed looks at how the heart responds to exercise, rather than exercise itself," said Zhanlin Chen, a medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the study’s lead author, who will present their findings at the 2025 American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session later this month.
"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," he said in a statement, per SciTechDaily.
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Researchers say this new metric has the potential to detect cardiovascular disease.
The study authors pulled Fitbit data and digital health records of 7,000 U.S. adults from the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us research program. Their analysis included 5.8 million people/days and 51 billion total steps.
Using the DHRPS metric, they found that people in the top 25th percentile (who were classified as "elevated DHRPS") were more likely to suffer a cardiovascular event than their peers. A full statistical breakdown of their findings is as follows:
- Twice as likely to develop Type 2 diabetes
- 1.7 times as likely to suffer heart failure
- 1.6 times as likely to have high blood pressure
- 1.4 times as likely to have coronary atherosclerosis
Interestingly, the researchers didn’t find a correlation between elevated DHRPS and the likelihood of stroke or heart attack. Further analysis showed that DHRPS led to more cardiovascular disease diagnoses than referencing daily heart rate or step count individually.
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The takeaway:
Research indicates that DHRPS may help detect someone’s likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease and subsequently encourage more folks to get proactive about health screenings. Plus, the equation is easy enough that anyone can do it. Chen also hopes that tech companies will integrate the metric into smartwatches so users can have the information on demand.
However, Chen said more research is needed to refine the DHRPS method.
"Wearables are welcomed by the consumer and worn throughout the day, so they actually have minute-to-minute information about the heart function," said Chen. "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."
