Echo: Watch Heart Rate Monitor

I use a Garmin head unit on my mountain bike for tracking all my rides. I’m also a huge data geek and have power meters, speed, and cadence sensors on both of my mountain bikes and my road bike. I also love collecting HR data, but I can’t stand wearing the chest strap, so having an app that allows me to use my Apple Watch Ultra as an external HR monitor is awesome. Most of the time, this works great, but for some odd reason, I’ll occasionally look down at my Garmin and realize it’s not getting any HR data. I’ll then open up my phone and notice that the app has closed out on its own. Restarting the app immediately reconnects it to my Garmin. This will typically happen once per hour at most (and not necessarily every ride), but on one ride last week, it disconnected 3 times in one hour. From what I’ve read in the reviews on other comparable apps, this one seems to be the most reliable (not sure why there are so many connection issues with HR apps), but if they could get it to stop crashing, this would be 5 stars all the way.

I’ve been using this app for a couple of weeks now and really love the convenience of not having to wear a chest strap to track my heart rate. The ease of just pressing a button to connect and start syncing my heart rate from my Apple Watch to my Nordictrack treadmill is a dream come true!! Thank you for developing it!! I love that it keeps my workout data if my watch dies during a workout. My watch will sync it to my phone once it recharges. My only issue is that I lose my workout data if I forget to stop it before I start another workout in another app that uses my watch. For instance, I usually do a mindful cooldown in Apple Fitness+ after my workout. If I don’t stop my Echo app before starting the mindful cooldown, the Echo is “interrupted” and will stop (to allow the Apple Fitness+ to take over), which is fine, but it should stop at that point and post my workout data, not lose it altogether. This has happened multiple times, so I am certain it’s not a fluke. You’d think, after so many times of losing my workout data, I’d remember to stop the echo app before starting another workout, but I guess I’m just too tired to think through that many steps. I hope the developers see this and fix it so I will stop losing my echo workout data. Surely others have noticed the same issue?

We purchased a treadmill in January of 2021 that has BLE heart rate monitor capabilities. After doing some research, I ran across a number of positive reviews for the ECHO app. When I first got the app, the brand of treadmill that we bought wasn’t listed in the available manufacturer list but I tried each one just to see if any may end up working. Sure enough, one of them worked and I emailed the ECHO team to share what I found to work. Figured it would benefit other users. Within a week, the app was updated and the brand of my treadmill was listed and worked perfectly. I’m not naïve enough to think that my email was what added my brand to the list but it just showed that they had already been working on updating the app. They even reached out to me a while after just to see if things were still working right. They certainly have. I have a series 6 watch, non-cellular, and an iPhone 11 Pro Max. Everything has worked flawlessly for about three months now. I definitely recommend the ECHO app if you have a BLE capable treadmill.