I've posted my experience with my THREE monitors, all cheap Chinese stuff, <=$20 in local stores or postpaid from Hong Kong. My imitation Polar -- chest-strap monitor with two contact plus wrist-watch readout -- is wonderful. I had no problems with the incision(s), but I was suffering from extreme itchiness and skin irritation, and the chest band definitely added to that. But the strap thing gave me almost 100% real-time reliable readouts, esp. for some of my first outdoor walks and esp. esp. for my two post-op Whistler ski trips! Occasionally the readout goes "irrational" -- either because the pads lose contact with my chest skin, or because the watch loses the wireless signal -- but fortunately it's easy to spot when that's happened, so it's not misleading. (It usually reads ~235 BPM when it goes nuts, which I've never fallen for, AND the flashing heart icon that shows individual heartbeats is always absent, which is a tip-off.)
I was shmearing skin creams all over my chest to soothe my skin -- but most of them seem to be electrical insulators, which interfere with the chest-strap's contacts, as well as clinical ECG contacts. (I was well shmeared when I went to my first Cardio Rehab session, for a stress test, and the technician was giving up on ever getting readings from her Holter-like monitor, until we got some rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs, and I scrubbed off the skin cream -- THEN everything finally worked!)
My other two monitors are: (1) a (cheap Chinese) wrist-strap BP-and-HR monitor which has been working very well for ~4 months post-op, except for ~1 day of error messages quite a while back, when it wouldn't reach a full pump-up. And (2) a <$10 wrist-watch-only on-demand HR (and calorie-burn) monitor. It took me a while to get it to give me a good reading at all(from pressing my finger-tip on the Infra-Red sensor button), and it still fails, esp. when my hands are cold. It's a nice-looking fully functional sport watch, and I wore it every day until about a week ago, when I returned to my fave SS Citizen Navisail watch. It turns out I can measure my HR on-demand pretty easily with a simple watch and a few fingers on my pulse for 10 or 12 seconds, so this monitor didn't really add much. (I've never used the calorie and "stress" meter, though it's quite sophisticated -- especially at the price!)
My main regret is that I bought all 3 of these gizmos POST-op, and I wish I'd done some serious monitoring PRE-op, both before I developed symptoms and afterwards. I'm now moving back toward normal, but I've never documented exactly what that is, so I'm guessing, and I wish I knew.
