Really obvious high heart rate notifications not working?

Hi Jmcc 118!

Thanks for posting your issue.

I have well-documented and serious heart problems so am also reliant upon accurate data *as well as* prompt delivery of notifications that require my attention — such as with the high heart rate issue you have also described here.

Hopefully if enough folks post, then Apple will finally do something about it.

Please keep us posted here and I'll do the same. Thanks!

Hi Al,

i hope this thread is still alive because I am experiencing the same issue.

Last night my watch recorded an abnormally heart rate for 2 hours (3:45-5:34) with a HR of about 110-120. Normal heart rate when I sleep is 50.

It measured the heart rate 20 times during that time and each measurement was above 110. After 5:35 it dropped right back down to around 45-50 and stayed there till I woke up at 08:20.

i looked though my health app and found two similar instances in November. I only wear my watch to bed 1-2 nights a week so I don’t have much to compare to but all the other nights (about 15) were normal.

No high heart rate notification was triggered.

i am currently freaking out. It’s hard for me to believe that there measurements might have been wrong because 20 measurements were taken last night all with the same result.

did anyone hear back from Apple??

Hi,

Same problem here.

at night I have periods of low heart rate (under 50 for 10 minutes or longer), and I do get warnings for those.

But for periods of high heart rate (over 100 for between 15 minutes and over an hour) and I get no warnings.

I have a condition that causes palpitations (also during the day), so I suspect the apple watch data are not an artfact, but real.

The watch is Apple watch 5. The software is up to date.

The watch does not show in the sources for high heart rate warnings.

Once I woke up during a period of these high heart rates and I felt my heart racing. And made an ECG with the apple watch. It showed I had fluctuating periods of several seconds of normal heart rate (arouund 60) and then several seconds of fast heart rate around 100). On and off. So I do thinks the high heart rate the apple watch shows, is correct.

I checked my nocturnal heart rate with a pulse-oximeter that meassures also heartrate. This showed higher than normal heart rate (around 80, while my normal sleeping heartrate is around 50) in the time the apple watch said it had been over 100. I did some research about the algorithm, it turns out these pulse-oximeters don't want to notice all the spikes (in clinical settings these are often artfacts and then the thing starts beeping for nothing) , so the software levels the spikes out. I mean, it calculates the heart rate from a somewhat longer period of time. If you calculate the mean heart reate from a periode of fluctuations, you see a somewhat elevated heart rate, but not als high as what the apple watch meassures. I think the algorithm that the apple watch uses, takes a shorter periode of meassurements to calculate the heartrate from (but this is just my guess)

I have had no high heart rate notifications since I bought my watch in April 2020. I have a series 5 watch and an iPhone 12. I had an iPhone 10 before this. My watch clearly shows more than 10 minutes of sustained high heart rates and there are no notifications. The data sources list “none” for high heart rate notifications. I’ve called apple support and spoke with multiple people, updated, reset etc...still nothing. Even sent it in for repair. Came back with the same problem. Clearly these watches have a problem and there does not seem to be a fix for it. Mine is still under warranty and they refuse to honor the warranty stating that it is a software issue not a hardware issue. Ok. But it was marketed as having this feature. If the feature doesn’t work, it should be repaired or replaced. Apple will do neither.

I also swapped to the other wrist at night. And a couple of days later I had another hight heart rate period while sleeping. So the wrist did not matter.

I found it hard to explain why the wrist would make a difference anyway.

I (re)installed HeartWatch, which someone in this discussion said does give warnings for high heart rate. I can confirm that it does.

Still just curious about how reliable the readings are. I had a spike the other night, and when it spikes it seems to do it several nights in a row, so I wore another device, an older Garmin Forerunner 235. Sure enough Apple showed another spike and Garmin recorded no such spike. I’ve never had a racing heart during the day and all heart test have shown as normal. So I’m leaning towards believing apple has a bug in the night time heart rate monitoring algorithm, but it’d be nice to know either way.

Pulse spiking up unexpectedly on iwatch 6

i purchased and iwatch 6 only three months ago. Just for fun, today I was exploring features and I found the heart rate notifications. I was alarmed when noticed pulse rate spikes from 75-80 up to 130-160 during the day as well as at night when the same watch was telling me I was in deep sleep. I called my doc, run many tests and they all came back normal. I called Apple support and they suggested to send the watch to the “depot” for hardware testing. Two days later the watch came back with the message “can’t reproduce the issue” or similar. Back to Apple tec support again. This time they asked me to pair the phone from the back up (no improvement) and then once again set it up as a new watch (no improvement). This afternoon I was taking a gentle walk and suddenly got readings of pulse spiking from 87 to 177!!! I’m calling Apple again tomorrow. I wander what they’ll suggest this time. Any suggestions anyone? Dan

Pulse spiking up unexpectedly on iwatch 6

i purchased and iwatch 6 only three months ago. Just for fun, today I was exploring features and I found the heart rate notifications. I was alarmed when noticed pulse rate spikes from 75-80 up to 130-160 during the day as well as at night when the same watch was telling me I was in deep sleep. I called my doc, run many tests and they all came back normal. I called Apple support and they suggested to send the watch to the “depot” for hardware testing. Two days later the watch came back with the message “can’t reproduce the issue” or similar. Back to Apple tec support again. This time they asked me to pair the phone from the back up (no improvement) and then once again set it up as a new watch (no improvement). This afternoon I was taking a gentle walk and suddenly got readings of pulse spiking from 87 to 177!!! I’m calling Apple again tomorrow. I wander what they’ll suggest this time. Any suggestions anyone? Dan

Pulse spiking up unexpectedly on iwatch 6

i purchased and iwatch 6 only three months ago. Just for fun, today I was exploring features and I found the heart rate notifications. I was alarmed when noticed pulse rate spikes from 75-80 up to 130-160 during the day as well as at night when the same watch was telling me I was in deep sleep. I called my doc, run many tests and they all came back normal. I called Apple support and they suggested to send the watch to the “depot” for hardware testing. Two days later the watch came back with the message “can’t reproduce the issue” or similar. Back to Apple tec support again. This time they asked me to pair the phone from the back up (no improvement) and then once again set it up as a new watch (no improvement). This afternoon I was taking a gentle walk and suddenly got readings of pulse spiking from 87 to 177!!! I’m calling Apple again tomorrow. I wander what they’ll suggest this time. Any suggestions anyone? Dan

Pulse spiking up unexpectedly on iwatch 6

i purchased and iwatch 6 only three months ago. Just for fun, today I was exploring features and I found the heart rate notifications. I was alarmed when noticed pulse rate spikes from 75-80 up to 130-160 during the day as well as at night when the same watch was telling me I was in deep sleep. I called my doc, run many tests and they all came back normal. I called Apple support and they suggested to send the watch to the “depot” for hardware testing. Two days later the watch came back with the message “can’t reproduce the issue” or similar. Back to Apple tec support again. This time they asked me to pair the phone from the back up (no improvement) and then once again set it up as a new watch (no improvement). This afternoon I was taking a gentle walk and suddenly got readings of pulse spiking from 87 to 177!!! I’m calling Apple again tomorrow. I wander what they’ll suggest this time. Any suggestions anyone? Dan

Did you make an ECG with your apple watch while it showed your heartrate was 177 during your gently walk? I recommend doing that. It could be that you have palpitations or arhytmia, and that you don't feel it (this is quite normal and neither does it have to be harmfull). I have returned a garmin smartwatch because it showed crazy high heartbeats during gentle walks and slow e-bikerides. Then I bought an apple watch - which showed the same crazy heartrates as the garmin did. Turned out I had something wrong with my health, not with my watch.

About the spiking heartrates during the night, while sleeping: I am having a 3 day holter registration later this week, to see if it shows them too.

Does anyone have any further updates on this issue please? I have just had the same on my series 5 (iPhone 11 Pro V.14.4.1). Usual pretty regular resting (sleeping) hr is 40-48 and shows normal dips from falling asleep to deep sleep but last night around about 3am I my heart rate apparently went up to 125 for about 20minutes!! I did not wake up during this episode so was most surprised (I did a double take - WTF!) when I saw it on my Sleep App report. No high heart rate notification arrived. I had a low heart rate notification on 17th Feb (under 45 for more than 10 mins whilst sleeping) but that did not worry me because I like to think I am quite fit! The only thing I have recently done differently in the 18mths since purchasing is changed the strap on Wednesday to an elastic band style - just for a bit of variety. I would be interested to hear any updates. Thanks

After a 5 km run, I was performing cool down exercises when I suddenly got a high heart rate notification of elevated heart rate of more than 120 bpm for more than 10 minutes. Now definitely it was not a period of inactivity as I just completed the run and was in plank position for close to 2 minutes which may have elevated the heart rate. Such notifications create anxiety and Apple should look into these notifications logics much more carefully.

Did anyone ever get a resolution on this?

I had the same issue happen last night. for a period of half an hour there are a number of readings that are approximately 2x the readings on either side.

This was the first time in a few months... when it happened several times at the end of 2020, I went through a cardiac work up and was told I’m fine... but the holter monitor vendor doesn’t report the kind of granular details I’d need to rule out specific instances of this by comparing time stamps.

Bottom line did anyone conclusively prove it was the watch and not some misdiagnosed or undiagnosed issue? I’m trying not to drive myself insane over it.