Sports & fitness

Sports watches

Today's connected sports watches are really computers more than just watches. They embraced the freedom of wireless connectivity early on and as such represent some of the most advanced connectivity products you will find. They can connect to a range of sensors such as heart rate and cadence to offer visual feedback on the watch alone, or can relay up to the smartphone and from there to the cloud as well. Bluetooth Low Energy enhanced the functionality of sports watches considerably so that they now also offer e-mail and social media notifications and are even moving into watch as identification and payment devices. Sports watches come in a range of complexity and may need advanced multiprotocol SoCs as single chip designs, or less sophsiticated connectivity processors as companions to very powerful main application processors. An ever present requirement irrespective is outstanding energy efficiency given they run from relatively small limited power sources.

Suitable devices

nRF52840 aQFN73 SoC bluetooth le/bluetooth low energy bt module — nRF52840

nRF52832 SoC bluetooth le/bluetooth low energy bt module — nRF52832

nRF52810 SoC bluetooth le/bluetooth low energy bt module — nRF52810

Bike equipment

Cycling is a very popular market for connected products. The range of connected equipment is very diverse from powerful bike computers to a range of sensor equipment that includes torque and power, cadence, speed and lighting. These products have differing requirements in terms of processing power and size of applications. However, they do all have a requirement for Bluetooth Low Energy and/or ANT connectivity and as battery operated products need exceptional energy efficiency.

Suitable devices

Activity trackers

Activity trackers are a phenomenon. Bursting on to the scene less than 10 years ago, almost everyone how has one. They are cool, fashionable and they offer the everyday person a simple, fun means with which to assess their activity and exercise with goals and competition an integral part of how they are used. Bluetooth Low Energy was critical to enabling the activity tracker with ultra-low power communication over Bluetooth low energy to our smartphones. Today’s SoCs need to be very capable to meet the modern activity trackers needs, with outstanding energy efficiency, rich peripheral sets and compute power topping the list.

Suitable devices

outdoor man sunset person board riding young grass air frisbee park sun jumping boy surfing standing trick holding shirt doing flying field game ramp

Heart rate monitors

Heart rate monitors are essential companions to most modern connected sports equipment and watches. Bluetooth Low Energy and ANT offer highly efficeint modes of communication from heart rate monitor to hub, smartphone, watch or exercise computer. These products require fast processing of data for outstanding energy efficiency - for years of battery lifetime from a coincell battery and also for very compact size.