want: Wireless Heart Rate Monitor for iPhone

pulsebeat

CC Photo by Lars P.

Here’s a product I’d like to find that just doesn’t seem to be available yet: a wireless heart rate monitor for the iPhone. I use RunKeeper when jogging to track distance, speed and elevation. This is a terrific app that produces beautiful graphs of your run allowing you to compile and share data, but there’s one data point missing and that’s heart-rate. A heart rate monitor would allow you to aim for target zones and optimize calories burned as well as track improvements in your fitness level.
[GARD]
There’s a couple of ways I could see this working, none of which seem like they’d be too difficult to implement.

1) A wireless bluetooth heart rate monitor.
This would strap on your chest and sync to your phone allowing data to be streamed and tracked as you run. You would need no extra hardware physically attached to your phone.

2) A dongle that picks up existing wireless standards from heart rate monitors
There are a few different standards already out there for wireless heart rate monitors used by Polar, Suunto and Garmin to name a few. Why not use one of the existing ones? A reciever that could plug in to your iPhone and send data to an app (ideally runkeeper) would be excellent as long as it wasn’t to large or unwieldy. Considering they fit recievers into watches, I don’t see why they would need to be very large.

So if you’re reading this and your work for one of the fitness equipment manufacturers out there, how about it?  Can we have a heart rate monitor that will work with the iPhone.

Or if I’m wrong and such a product already exists I’d love to hear from you – where can I get one?

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