Whoop Accuracy – Now Validated Against the Gold Standard kinda
Whoop Accuracy – Now Validated Against the Gold Standard kindaMore: the Whoop Review,
Whoop has reported several improvements to its accuracy over the last year, the latest a few weeks ago.
In a recent blog post, the company highlighted recent internal tests and older scientific studies purporting to support its claims of accurate sleep stage detection.
Why is this important?
Every Whoop owner wants accurate data, but how do we know what is correct? Most scientific studies have commercial conflicts of interest, and, at best, most reviewers represent a sample of N=1 – worse still, almost every non-specialist reviewer does not appreciate that heart rate accuracy during endurance workouts offers no guarantees of accuracy during strength workouts or accuracy of sleep metrics.
This site has long discussed the difficulty of wearables agreeing with gold standard polysomnography; other sites like @TheQuanfiedScientist on YouTube have gone further than all reviewers and attempted to assess sleep stage accuracy based on consumer-grade polysomnography (N=1). The reality is that only lab-based polysomnography is valid. Even then, it is challenging to achieve gold-standard accuracy levels, not least because tests require the intervention of multiple humans monitoring each test subject (expensive) – the polysomnograph itself is thought to be only 80% accurate, so all other tools must be correct to a lesser degree than that – thus a 90% agreement with polysomnography might translate to, at best, a 72% level of accuracy. OK, but not great.
what Are Whoop’s Claims?
In recent years, Central Queensland University (2022) and the University of Arizona (2020) have undertaken tests to determine the accuracy of the whoop.
More recently, Whoop made further claims (2025) that its INTERNAL TESTING has shown recent product changes have improved sleep stage classification by over 7%. Furthermore, the same tests show over 3% improvement in detecting the waking state, which is particularly important for short wake period detection.
3rd Party Findings
There have also been additional third-party studies of WHOOP having paramount accuracy:
- This Central Queensland University study found
- WHOOP is 99.7% accurate in measuring heart rate
- Whoop is 99% accurate in measuring heart rate variability during sleep—accuracy levels surpassing all other wearables in the study.
- WHOOP was excellent in identifying sleep when compared to the gold-standard polysomnography (PSG)
- WHOOP outperformed the other devices in calculating the total time spent asleep.
- Schyvens et al. from Antwerp University Hospital (2023) found WHOOP was the most accurate wearable across several categories compared to the gold-standard polysomnography.
- My (N=1 ) tests for Whoop’s accuracy in The Whoop Review show that Whoop is generally accurate for activities when worn correctly.
- @TheQuantifiedScientist clearly shows excellent sleep stage performance (N=1) compared to competitor products
Take Out
No wearable gives accurate sleep stage determination.
Whoop is better than most.
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One of these days, the study will actually matter by time it comes out. Sigh.
In this case, the Aus study was on the Whoop 3 vs Apple Watch Series 6 vs Garmin FR245 vs Polar Vantage V1…oh, and Oura Ring V2.
The HR accuracy was only during sleeping, not workouts. One only needs to do a few quick sprints to see the Whoop 4.0 HR quickly falls apart during high intensity short-duration efforts.
The HRV they did in the study is even wonkier, because for the FR245 they did a single 3-minute manual test (since the FR245 doesn’t do overnight HRV), and then bizarrely compared that to the overnight values for the other units.
I remember getting 160+ heart rate while washing dishes or other activities where wrist movement is involved when I tried WHOOP 😀
+1, even walking get me to 160 sometimes specially downhills and wearing on bicep as everyone praises it works 😛 specially when my rest heart rate is like 38 and i was recording my walk at least the algorithm should just ignore it to avoid count as a sprint strain lol
+1
Yeah this seems like all the nutritional “scientific studies” where they don’t even put a placebo or just give some product and say it improve recovery by 5% at only look at 5 or 6 person or the big one on mouses 😛
throwing the aspartame recent study back on the social media again when the study didn’t even translate well the amount and said it was like 3 diet cokes a day and in reality is way more… i always doubt when all this company comes with praising a study that make them 90%º reliable
I love to open the articles and see the “conflict of interests”
1 – Arizona Study
Conflict of interest statement
All authors have seen and approved the manuscript. Work for this study was performed at University of Arizona. This study was funded by a grant to the University of Arizona from WHOOP Inc., Boston, Massachusetts. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
2 – I really love this one, funding saying the companies had no input but they are funded by Whoop lol
Funding
This study was funded by the Australian Institute of Sport. The wearables companies had no input in the design of the study or interpretation of the results. The results of the study do not constitute an endorsement of the wearables by the Australian Institute of Sport, authors or the journal.
Conflicts of Interest
G.D.R., C.S., and D.J.M. are members of a research group at Central Queensland University (i.e., The Sleep Lab) that receives support for research (i.e., funding, equipment) from WHOOP Inc. However, WHOOP was not involved in the design, conduct or reporting of this study.
Cmon at least mention all these biased on this article or you would be doing the same as Whoop and just doing a marketing text
I love to open the articles and see the “conflict of interests”
1 – Arizona Study
Conflict of interest statement
All authors have seen and approved the manuscript. Work for this study was performed at University of Arizona. This study was funded by a grant to the University of Arizona from WHOOP Inc., Boston, Massachusetts. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
2 – I really love this one, funding saying the companies had no input but they are funded by Whoop lol
Funding
This study was funded by the Australian Institute of Sport. The wearables companies had no input in the design of the study or interpretation of the results. The results of the study do not constitute an endorsement of the wearables by the Australian Institute of Sport, authors or the journal.
Conflicts of Interest
G.D.R., C.S., and D.J.M. are members of a research group at Central Queensland University (i.e., The Sleep Lab) that receives support for research (i.e., funding, equipment) from WHOOP Inc. However, WHOOP was not involved in the design, conduct or reporting of this study.
Cmon at least mention all these biased on this article or you would be doing the same as Whoop and just doing a marketing text
You’ve done it for me, thank you!
I agree though, very very many of these types of studies have conflicts of interest. Whoop is little different from anyone else in this respect.
This is what Whoop does. Marketing spin & lies vs spending the money designing a more accurate sensor. So sick of these guys.
Thanks Mike 🙂
They do a lot of marketing, for sure. Clearly they do it well.
Optical HR is inherently flawed in every implementation I’ve seen.
N=1, I include above an image of the sports-grade accuracy i received and the sleep-testing accuracy from ThequantifiedScientist. DCR highlights how he breaks the Whoop in his comment above. He generally finds Garmin elevate sensor to be the best (I think i’m right in saying that if you read this Ray).But these tests, including mine, are N=1. Even in thequantifiedscientist’s case where a freind has helped out that’s N=2 and still not scientifically valid.
ohr accuracy varies by person, environment and use-case. you can see that on the Garmin forums,whoop reddit forum or any forums for any brand.
who pays for the tests we all want?
i use a chest strap…even for the sleep stuff (waking measurement)
Yeah, generally speaking, I see Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor & Apple’s latest gen optical HR sensors as pretty equal and very solid. Like all sensors (optical and chest/ECG), they can have bad moments, even just briefly. But on the whole, I’d usually trust either of those two sensors in almost any workout I can throw at it.
Whoop has come a long way in accuracy, but ironically, the thing that they cater to the most (Crossfit, HIIT, gym, etc…) is the area that they are actually the worst at, again, for those short-duration high intensity intervals (30-45s).
Just a comment on sleep stage tracking – I would venture to say that no HRV based device/algorithm currently is reliable enough to depend upon. Look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38005466/ which uses the H10 and “state of the art” algorithms for sleep stages – the limits of agreement to PSG are huge. I have an EEG based tracker and my Pixel watch 3 doesn’t come close. IMO, we would be better off without this (misleading data) in making decisions regarding training and recovery.