MIO promises the Holy Grail for athletes this fall.

Soon, all sports and fitness lovers will be able to get rid of their old hours to measure heart rate. The Canadian company MIO plans to launch this fall the world's first ALPHA watch for continuous pulse recording, which will not have a chest strap.

New ALPHA watches are worn like regular watches and immediately begin to show the pulse without additional tweaks. Their owner at the same time can do any physical exercise, including running at a speed of 20 km / h. Such opportunities are a breakthrough for devices of this kind.

To promote ALPHA to the market, MIO launched a pre-order using the Kickstarter fundraising service and has already raised the required amount.

A bit of history

Until recently, athletes could only choose from two types of devices for measuring heart rate during exercise. The first option: complete with a watch comes with a separate chest strap, which transmits data on the contraction of the heart to the clock by radio. To use such a sensor is inconvenient, and additional care is required. The second option: the athlete to measure the pulse should press the clock sensor with his other hand. This method does not allow to measure the pulse continuously. At the same time, it should be added that watches of the second type were also first released for sale by the company MIO.
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In fact, for twenty years now, the fitness industry has been looking for a simple and convenient way to measure the pulse on the wrist, which could be built into the watch. The problem is that the pulse is easily measured on a fixed arm in many ways, but as soon as the arm starts to move, all these technologies cannot distinguish the pulse signals against the background of noise from moving skin, vessels, tendons and muscles. When a person is running, the level of such noise is a thousand or more times higher than the signal level from a pulse wave. Therefore, it is not surprising that some Kickstarter users have noted that the ALPHA features sound too fantastic. Especially for them, Liz Dickenson, the CEO and founder of MIO, recently shot a short video.



In continuation, it is impossible not to mention that one of the first attempts by MIO to create such a watch was undertaken jointly with a team from the Moscow Aviation Institute. A pulse wave measurement method was tested using a miniature radar. Unfortunately, the capabilities of the technology turned out to be insufficient to solve the mentioned problem with noise.

Filling

ALPHA uses a technology similar to those used in hospitals for many years to register heartbeats. It looks like an optical sensor worn on the ear or finger. However, this method is well suited only for recording the pulse, when the patient moves little, but as soon as he begins to move more actively, the sensor flies or incorrectly measures the pulse.

Despite the difficulties, the company MIO, working together with the team from PHILIPS, was able to develop a special electro-optical sensor that more reliably records the pulse. Below the photo shows the sensor with two LEDs on a separate printed circuit board. To account for interference from hand movement, an accelerometer was added to the sensor. Data from both sensors are analyzed by a specialized microprocessor on board the clock. As a result, the clock continuously displays the user's pulse in real time.



Information about the pulse ALPHA can transmit over the air interfaces Ant + or BlueTooth4.0. Thus, it is possible to connect a cell phone to the clock by radio and to track the pulse through them. The clock API will be open for this purpose.

In addition to the heart rate, the watch will be able to register heart rate variability, which opens the way to using them not only in sports, but also in medicine and other areas related to the assessment of a person's condition (for example, to track the onset of drowsiness among train drivers).

It is nice to mention that the author of this article is developing functions for hours to measure the stress and fatigue of a user, which will be added to ALPHA capabilities in addition to pulse measurement in the future.