I do a variety of exercises including Wii dancing and other outdoor activities. While I do wear a heart strap for many of them, some of them can be tricky with a heart strap. For example, in dancing the heart strap can slip down. So I was very interested in what the Mio Drive heart rate monitor watch offered.

First, the watch is one solid unit with a plastic band. That band gets slippery and sweaty very quickly. It also seems to have holes that are on either side of my wrist size - it's either too tight or too lose. I'm not sure why they don't have replaceable bands like most watches do, so I can get the style of band I prefer to this that fits me. It would seem easy enough to have the standard watch pins on either side of the main unit to allow that.

The watch setup was fairly straightforward, to enter my height, weight, and so on. It has all the standard watch features that most watches have such as timers.

So on to its main purpose in life - reading your heart rate. It just would not work well for me. In the first place it's fairly tricky to get your fingers in the exact right spot to push in both buttons fully. And once that's done, the hit-and-miss rate was about 50-50 for giving me a good value or a wildly wrong one. It could measure extremely low or extremely high. I didn't have faith when it gave me a middle range value if it was right or off - and I'd then have to go to another device to verify. By which point I might as well be using that other device.

Also, if I'm dancing, the action of getting the fingers in place and dealing with all of that then makes me slow down which both interrupts my activity and affects my heart rate.

If I was doing something fairly stationary - like riding a stationary bike - it might not be bad to fiddle with it for a full minute to figure out my heart rate while my legs kept going around. But even then, with it not giving me accurate information a lot of the time, I'm still not sure it would be good for me.

Maybe I don't sweat enough to activate the contacts fully. Maybe my wrist is an odd shape. I'm just not sure. But I can report that for me this isn't a good option.

I was provided a review unit by the Amazon Vine program.


Lisa Shea's Library of Low Carb Books