Comment My little sister's class uses these. (Score 1) 950
Oddly, only the women's PE classes, but I presume the male classes chose to spend their money elsewhere. They use them simply to see if they are getting into their target heart rate while they were running around or if the teachers needed to beat their asses harder. Your child's school's technology may be different, but with our district, they're writing down HR data in their own notebooks to track it (presumably printing is an option as well, but when you're outside. . . ), so any data collected was penned by the student's own hand. I was surprised that there were no permission slips to even have this data streamed on a display, but their absence in an otherwise permission slip-heavy public school makes me fairly sure nothing was being saved.
Also, just as an aside, heart rate monitors are most likely not going to catch arrhythmias. Anything that a school or government/private grant has funded is probably not going to be of high enough quality to even let somebody go in with calipers and measure the distance between the complexes in the waveforms (if that's the form of output used). Even if the output looks like your standard quick-look EKG format, any arrhythmia that's asymptomatic enough for a kid to be even attempting to do gym class is probably subtle enough that anybody who's not a doctor is going to miss it. A dangerously high or low heart rate it could catch, and there are exceptions, obviously (stable SVT, etc.) but in general, it's probably not going to help a whole lot in that regard.
Also, just as an aside, heart rate monitors are most likely not going to catch arrhythmias. Anything that a school or government/private grant has funded is probably not going to be of high enough quality to even let somebody go in with calipers and measure the distance between the complexes in the waveforms (if that's the form of output used). Even if the output looks like your standard quick-look EKG format, any arrhythmia that's asymptomatic enough for a kid to be even attempting to do gym class is probably subtle enough that anybody who's not a doctor is going to miss it. A dangerously high or low heart rate it could catch, and there are exceptions, obviously (stable SVT, etc.) but in general, it's probably not going to help a whole lot in that regard.