Support for pebble smartwatch

[Gustav Delius]

It seems to me that the Pebble Android smartwatch, see  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android, would be very useful for a rowing application. It has a built-in accelerometer and perhaps an accelerometer worn on the rower's wrist will give more accurate or additional data not available just from the acceleration of the boat. Presumably it can get more accurate information about the rower's actual stroke technique and timing. Also, fixing the phone in the boat would no longer be necessary. Instead the phone could simply be carried in a pocket. Does this sound sensible?

[tshalif]

A device attached to the boat has a reasonably predictable force lines to monitor. If the device rotates in all 3 axes during a stroke, it would take a much more complicated algorithm to analyze them.

[tshalif]

Ah, on a second thought: If there was a stable enough gravity/acceleration independent orientation data input at high enough frequency, this shouldn't be too difficult. The only gravity/acceleration independent sensor I can think of is the compass - but I don't know if it is accurate enough.

[Michael Hosemann]

Just some thoughts:
Would that watch have to be on the rower's wrist? If there would be an
attachement for the footplate like there are handlebar attachements
for bikes, it could work quite well. In the days before a I had a
smartphone I had my running watch attached to a tubular cross beam in
the boat. It was very readable.
Given that the watch is probably very light and can be mounted very
solidly, I'd imagine that there are fewer spurious signals due to the
phone/holder vibrating than we find on phones.

Michael

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[Gustav Delius]

Interesting discussion. My intuition had led me to believe that the strokes would be much easier to detect reliably on the wrist than on the boat because the wrist makes much more pronounced movements on each stroke than the boat.

Gustav

[tshalif]

I guess Talos Rowing may actually work as-is from a writs watch. But not on the Pebble, I think. If accurate stroke rate is our only concern, a smart watch running Android could work almost out of the box, once the GUI layout is tweaked to support a very small screen.

[Gustav Delius]

Pebble is not a watch running Android. It is just a watch communicating with an Android smartphone. Talos would still have to run on the phone and would use the pebble watch just as a peripheral with an accelerometer and a small display.