Over the last year, we have been listening closely to our swimmers’ feedback on their experience with Instabeat, and our team is incorporating the findings in the design and testing plan of the second generation product.
As we already knew and our customers confirmed, heart rate accuracy is the most important feature of the product. Whether you are looking to win a race, get more fit or lose weight, the key to making progress is to elevate your heart rate into the correct training zone so your effort matches your goal.
Over the last 6 months, we’ve put together different heart rate sensor designs and gone through rigorous testing to validate their accuracy. We wanted to make sure that we were inclusive in our testing, meaning that we were testing it on all types of swimmers, from different parts of the world, in different pools, water, for different swimming motion, speeds, and so on.
As mentioned in our previous blog post, part of the new funding has been focused on having a dedicated testing team. They have been camping at the pool, recruiting swimmers to test on as many people as possible.
Note: If you are interested in being one of our testers and happen to be in either SF or Beirut, please contact us or fill out this questionnaire!
We compared our values to an EKG chest belt + watch and are very happy to share that we have been reliably getting a 0.99 correlation coefficient. The graph below represents a 15 minute swim of one of our panelists using 2 different Instabeat modules on each side of the head and a chest belt.
What does this mean?
We are at a stage where we are confident with the accuracy of our heart rate sensor design, and we are ready to move forward with the fine tuning of the algorithm. We will keep testing further to make sure that no matter who you are, where you are, and how you are swimming, you are getting accurate readings!
Fun testing facts:
Our testers collectively swam enough to have escaped from Alcatraz 7 times!
More soon, stay tuned!
Lilit