Heart rate monitor for scientific study I want to measure heart rate as part of a controlled experiment I am setting up. I've been trying to find information on which heart rate monitor to buy, but it's unclear to me which heart rate monitors allow exporting data to PC, and how open the data is. Can I only analyse the data through the software provided by the vendor, or is it common practice to be able to export it as e.g. CSV?


Are there any 'common' heartrate sensors used in the community?
Should I look for monitors which support a certain protocol/format?
Are there any vendors which I should avoid, e.g. when they have closed file formats?
I recently completed a study involving physical ergonomics of rifles.  We monitored heart rate and respiration using the Zephyr BioHarness.  It seemed to work pretty well.

It also monitors movement of the user, if that is of interest to you.

To get data out, it is possible to compile a report and export it to CSV, which works well if you need to do analysis on the data using other programs.