Last Updated on March 24, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We are convinced that their relationship to sports sensors companies has been regulated over a long period of time and also their testing methods. Is it not so, that it is for instance not possible to proof or disproof Rob ter Horsts tests, since his testing protocols are not published.
This reminds strongly to the procedure of Garmin. We are convinced according to our own little experience with for instance Garmin products, if Garmin does not want that users can verify certain parameters measured by their watches, it is very difficult to do this. The same with Rob ter Horst, The same with DC Rainmaker and 5kRunner.
Corners and edges are often missing in their tests, as for instance instance fundamental criticisms against manufacturers. This criticisms is there, but in a form which cannot be compared to the criticism of independent reviewers which have no advertising revenues from the manufacturers. For instance we do not know of discussions about issues with sports sensor accuracy studies which we discussed for instance in our review:
We criticized for instance Rob ter Horst since a longer period of time because of issues we have with him, but we do not know of any reaction of Rob upon this. This is a hint that the relationship of Rob, and eventually also DR Rainmaker, 5kRunner, etc. to sports sensor manufacturers is regulated by lawyers.
If that it is true, this confirms our observations that their reviews are stream lined, and that they are interesting for manufacturers, since they generally increase the sales rates of their products. But we do hardly know of any fundamental criticism of these reviewers concerning topics we discussed here:
and discussions about how accuracy tests could be made better. This make those only helpful to a limited degree for scientists who need objective numerical and statistical data for scientific studies.