Last Updated on February 2, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Dr. Ing. Rainer Blind, Universität Stuttgart, Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control called his android app a training tracker an “an Android app for the really serious athletes”:
https://github.com/rainerblind/aTrainingTracker
Did Dr. Ing. Rainer Blind call his app a Training tracke an app for the really serious athlete, since Dr. Ing. Rainer Blind did really serious research, as we can see on google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5nT3-7kAAAAJ&hl=de
But are we taken serious be other scientists, if we admit, that we to clinical and research studies with a training tracker? We do not doubt about the quality of a training tracker to be used for research. But we doubt about the quality of the Garmin watches to be used for research.
Sports watch manufactures have done a big effort to so that it is not possible in an easy way do access sensor data. But if we manage to do this, and do some serious research about the accuracy of Garmin watches, we find, for instance in our white paper, that the accuracy of most Garmin watches is not as high, so that it can be used for clinical and research applications.
We do not doubt either about the quality of the research work of Rob ter Horst PhD, which he does as a professional research scientist, which can be seen on his google scholar site:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=o6avANkAAAAJ&hl=nl
We do not doubt about the quality of the research work of Rob ter Horst, Phd which he does with commercially available sports watches, either. But what we makes us doubt is the big effort sports sensor manufactures have made so that it is not easy to access sensor data from their sports watches.
Did they do this, so that it is not possible in an easy way to control the quality of these sensor devices? If so, we think this is a failure.
We do not doubt about the quality of the research work of Rob ter Horst, PhD which he does
in his professional work, and we do not doubt about the quality of Rob ter Horsts research work regarding sports watches.
But if we look at the plots of Rob ter Horst, where he shows data from over 50 sports watches, with the tremendous amount of data, and we see at the bottom left a small circle with the face of Rob ter Horst on the microphone commenting his research work with consumer grade sports watches, we had to laugh about it. And we ask ourselves: Is Rob ter Horst a really serious athlete?