The following is a competitive analysis of the wearables fitness tracking space. Two key questions I had in mind while conducting this research was:

1. What can the leading fitness trackers measure in terms of fitness activity?
2. How do they take multiple sensor inputs and transform that into an accurate and trackable fitness activity?

These questions are key because one of the directions the team is pursuing is to use sensor data (potentially from a wearable) to measure a complex motion - basketball shots.

Market Leaders

Background

During the pandemic, consumers strongly leaned into at-home fitness:

The global home fitness equipment market is expected to grow from $8.42 billion in 2020 to $9.9 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.6%. The market is expected to reach $8.34 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of -4%.

• Reference: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211011005298/en/Home-Fitness-Equipment-Global-Market-Report-2021-COVID-19-Implications-and-Growth-to-2030---ResearchAndMarkets.com

It’s clear that consumers are willing to invest big on their health+fitness, and easily tracking and understanding their fitness data will be a big part of that.

Apple

• Apple recognizes the above and has increasingly bet big on the fitness capabilities of the Apple Watch.

• One signal - their launch of Fitness+ in late 2020. It’s a premium pay fitness subscription that is centered around the calorie burn+heart rate tracking of watch.

  https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/apple-fitness-plus/2021/9d1c8c7f-f68c-44cc-9f8c-fad7fccebb13/anim/intro_lockup/large_2x.mp4

  • Fitness+ is fundamentally an “ecosystem” play - BPM and calorie counting are common on other trackers offered from Garmin and Fitbit, but the realtime sync of that data onscreen with your active workout is difficult (if impossible) for competitors to achieve.

• In terms of the actual fitness activities the watch is able to measure (RE: question 1):

  

  From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207934

  • For the outdoors activities like Walk/Run/Cycling/Hiking/Swimming, Apple uses the GPS as a source of truth to help calibrate the watch’s built-in accelerometer and gyroscope to your specific fitness level and stride.
  • Most of the other fitness types seem to be based on calculating heart rate + cals burned. Of note, basketball is one of what I would call these more “basic” trackings.

• One particular tracking activity that I found super interesting to deep-dive into is Swim tracking. (RE: question 2)

  • Swim tracking is quite advanced compared to the other trackings.
  • It provides lap detection and stroke detection. This means that the watch needs to be able to detect when a person has either flip turned or spun around in the pool. It also needs to know when a person has switched strokes by tracking the watch sensor data that is coming in and comparing against a model trained on a data set of various swimmers the geeks at Apple have collected.

This Popular Science article provided a lot of interesting commentary on the details of this process. It’s worth a full read, but here are some juicy tidbits.

For collecting training data:

“Apple built its own algorithms to discern the stroke of swimmers of all skill levels, as well the calories they’re burning. The process involved gathering data from more than 700 swimmers and over 1,500 swim sessions.”

For open water swimming: