A method and apparatus for monitoring heart rate. The method includes receiving a digital heart monitoring signal, determining the integrity of said signal with a “hand detect” signal that confirms electrical connection to the subject, dividing the digital heart monitoring signal into at least one frame, generating a folded correlation value for the center sample in the at least one frame, identify the number of peaks folded correlation values based on amplitude and distance parameters of the digital heart monitoring signal in the at least one frame, removing false peaks and collecting peaks corresponding to a length of time, determining the heart rate based on the identified peaks wherein the identified peaks relate to a minimum distance between valid heart beat peaks based on a heart rate estimate, computing the weighted average of heart rate value based on the number of previous heart rate values.
