Stroke Rate and Heart Rate Tracking Improvements for Open Water swimming
An open water swim, when using our FORM goggles connected to a compatible smartwatch, uses the data from the watch exclusively. Up until now, we previously did not incorporate any of the goggle-based metrics as part of that experience, but that's about to change!
If you had a Polar OH1 or Verity sense heart rate monitor paired with your Smart Swim 1 goggles, it might have felt like a tradeoff to choose to get GPS data from a compatible watch while having to sacrifice the temple-based heart rate, settling for heart rate measured from the wrist. This was also a shame as we know that wrist-based heart rate data, especially in water, can have its limitations.
Now, with our Smart Swim 2 goggles, we’re very excited we can now leverage the heart rate data coming from your temple-based readings as it will now be available for every single swimmer. You’ll still get all the same GPS data from your watch, showing on your goggles, but can now use the integrated heart rate sensor for more accurate and consistent heart rate readings for your open water swims.
This even applies to our Smart Swim 1 goggles when connected to a Polar heart rate device. Your real-time swim experience will show you the heart rate data from your temple-based device.
Note: The post-swim analysis will still show the wrist-based heart rate since the data source on that file is from the watch for the time being. We think the most important thing first is to make sure you’re seeing your best data as you swim. So, this is still a big win!
In our goggles-only swim mode, every swimmer has the option to add real-time stroke rate, as a useful proxy to understand your swimming gears and effort in open water without having direct pace readings. In the swims with a compatible watch, this data was then missing as we couldn’t get the consistent experience we wanted with the stroking data with the various watch models.
Just like with our heart rate metric, we’ve now added real-time stroke rate as a selectable metric for your open-water swims when using a compatible watch. Want to know more about Real-Time Stroke rate and how it could benefit you? Check out this post!
With these additions, we are further elevating our open-water swimming experiences so every swimmer has the best tools to take control of their open-water swims.
