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HELSINKI – Whether they are specifically dedicated to sport, like sports watches, or more versatile and elegant, connected watches have become an increasingly common offshoot on the wrists of Italians. Sure they’re cool, but are they also useful? To answer, we cite the Huawei Health Survey 2023 research, which shows that the support of a smartwatch can help adopt positive habits with 87% of interviewees admitting to having changed their habits in light of the information provided by their smartwatch, which include, among others, greater frequency and longer duration of physical exercise.
Monitoring sports activities is certainly the most appreciated and used function by practitioners of endurance sports, such as cycling and running, but also by less common activities such as swimming and skiing. Once worn, smartwatches are capable of recording with accurate values not only steps, distance traveled and speed, thanks to GPS tracking, but also vital parameters such as heart rate, calories consumed and, in the case of more advanced devices, also VO2 max (the maximum volume of oxygen consumed per minute per kilogram of weight), which defines the personal cardiorespiratory and aerobic level, blood oxygenation (Sp02), body temperature and in some cases the estimate of blood pressure. In short, a real-time health monitoring station useful for everyone, not just those who practice sports.
What is Huawei Health Lab
To better understand how a smartwatch can convey the exact situation of the wearer’s physiological parameters, we went to Helsinki to the Huawei Health Lab, the new European laboratory, opened after the two Chinese ones in Xi’an and Songshan Lakes from 2016 to today. Accompanied by Petri Wiklund, director of the lab and doctor of sports medicine, we had the opportunity to visit the almost 1,000 square meters in which the Chinese giant dedicates itself to permanent research in the field of well-being and fitness monitoring algorithms applied to real life, the detection and verification of inputs and the incubation of new technological solutions. Here the multidisciplinary scientific research team, which has five different areas of study – physiology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, testing and software engineering – measures sports performance through advanced machinery used to monitor the parameters of over 20 of the most popular sports , such as running, cycling, swimming, but also alpine or cross-country skiing, fitness, as well as some sports activities for disabled people
The numbers
. Studies covering and monitoring more than 200 physiological indicators and based on different environments and sports simulation scenarios with 5 test areas, which include a counter-current swimming pool, a ski simulator, a multifunctional treadmill and an instrumented one, and a gym suitable for various cardiovascular workouts. At the basis of the measurements is the premise that the execution technique is as correct and plausible as possible and this is why the lab makes use of the collaboration of professional athletes capable of conveying the athletic gesture in its purest form. This is the special case of running, where to obtain the data necessary to refine the algorithm and provide the user with a truthful measurement, Huawei uses an advanced treadmill equipped with four 3D force plates, capable of measuring the reaction forces of the ground developed during running or walking to compare, for example, the right and left side as well as a series of measurements of different gait parameters such as contact duration, post-run, flight duration, count of steps, and so on. In addition to biomechanics, data on breathing linked to oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production are also recorded through a connected mask. We are talking about the measurement of VO2 Max, that is, the rate of maximum oxygen consumption capacity that the user can have while making physical effort. It measures a person’s cardiovascular fitness and also correlates with health, cardiovascular risk and longevity.
Huawei Watch Gt4
Thanks to the refinement of the algorithm – owned by Huawei – in terms of precision the Huawei Watch GT4 smartwatch settles at the same margin of error as laboratory measurements which are normally 5-10%. The interesting aspect is the possibility of having this data every day, several times a day. We were talking about swimming, another sport where wareable devices can be functional in improving performance and athletic movements. In this discipline the question of having good technique is perhaps more important than the physiological one and this is why Huawei, in its swimming pool, which also has a frontal water jet that simulates currents, makes use of the help of athletes professionals to provide their users with guidance on how to become better swimmers by providing them with physiological data and advice on technique. On performance monitoring, thanks to the studies carried out, even in swimming it is possible to have outputs similar to that of other sports, such as the development of training load, stress and recovery time. One of the strong points of the new Helsinki research laboratory is certainly the ski carpet, a huge Dutch-made treadmill used in some fitness centers and capable of effectively simulating sliding, allowing a real sensation of carving. The aim – through the carpet – is to simulate a realistic skiing scenario, thanks to an adjustable inclination between 10 and 18 degrees and with a speed that can reach up to 22 kilometers per hour. Also in this case, through sensors and cameras that are positioned on the athlete, it is possible to extrapolate accurate data on the biomechanics of skiing performance. Specifically, these are sensors positioned on the pelvis and legs, through shorts equipped with electromyographic sensors capable of measuring the muscular activity of the quadriceps and, through the interpolation of the heart rate data, identifying the threshold where the muscle stress. The large multifunctional treadmill remains, which can test different sports, including trail running, cycling, wheelchair running thanks to adjustable speeds of up to 50 km/h. In addition to mounting two cameras, one front and one side, the system can import GPX data to simulate any race and return data that is as accurate as possible, offering realistic scenarios of the difficulties that can be encountered in running and cycling. In the treadmill room there are also a series of spinning bicycles equipped with power sensors measured in watts, one of the most requested data by road cycling practitioners. Even with this equipment, the Huawei application allows the researcher to simulate various routes and measure heart rate and many other metrics. After having mapped all the possible sports, the team is focusing on wheelchair sports, as Dr. . Wiklund: «we want to become a point of reference also for all sports performed in conditions of disability. We are the first to do it and it makes us proud.” For the future, the researchers’ objective is to further lower the margin of error of the devices thanks to the further refinement of the proprietary algorithm and thus guarantee the scientific validity of its devices, based on the standards of heart rate, step counting, expenditure calories and VO2 Max.