Balena Health & Microsoft EventHubApp Azure Cloud Power Bi: two contemporary products to visualize and analyse sports sensor data

Last Updated on December 16, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

These two products by Balena & Microsoft open the door for sports sensor data analysis in InfluxDB and Grafana. We discussed on this site before, that Garmin Connect looks very similar to Home Assistant, which is based on InfluxDB & Grafana.

The difference is, that it is not possible for users to do their own special analysis in Garmin Connect. The Balena Health which supports Bluetooth low energy sensors and the Microsoft EventHubApp which can connect ANT+ based Garmin watches to contemporary data analysis tools are little known, and we do not know why. Both are great tools, which should be developed further.

The example of Home Assistant shows what can be done with contemporary tools. There is a huge community of Home Assistant developers, countless demos can be found on YouTube. The same is now possible with sports sensor devices.

But these pathways are not supported by sports sensor companies. We miss such tools since several years, and where promoting those here. Newer devices like Apple watches make it easier, but now, the tools are also available for Polar and Garmin watches.

Open tools for sports sensors allow a better quality control by users. Sports sensor data can be compared with data analysis software, which allow accuracy rankings. The quality rises and devices of poor quality will disappear, a development which is in favor of costumers. We promote this here as much as possible.

We usually don t code. We therefore use tools like a Training tracker, Polar Sensor Logger app, Mind Monitor, Microsoft Access, SQLite, Golden Cheetah, OpenBCI GUI etc.

But we could use modern tools like Python, InfluxDB, Grafana, Microsoft Power BI, and many more, as the Home Assistant community demonstrates, if a community of developers is there. We miss this community with sports sensor devices, but we are convinced, that this community will come.