Future Apps be written for more sports specific, such for tennis or soccer?

[kxyoung]

Many of us fibit users are avid tennis players.  In tennis, a lot of data and statistics are used to determine what needs to be worked on during practice.  Our tennis/soccer/running shoes are now equipped with sole inserts that accomodate sensors for keeping track of match performance, such as Adidas MiCoach SpeedCell, e.g. duration and directons of the active movements, rest between ralleys, etc., tracking and suggesting training routines for improvment or excerces to prevent injuries.  It would be an enhencement to the exisiting feature of tracking activities with Force, by holding down the button until the stop watch appeared.

I'm hoping that in the future, Apps will be written to fully utilize the fitbit devices' capabilities.

[LilBudyWizer]

Well, fundamentally the device is an all day activity tracking not a performance tracker. Really with tennis the thing that would make most sense to me a smart racket. A gyroscope, accelerometer as well sensors on every string on the racket. Pressure sensor on the handle to tell how you're gripping it. Making tennis rackets would be a bit out of Fitbit field of expertise though as would coaching tennis.

[kxyoung]

Babolat just came out to the market, the racquet with sensors that does what you described.  It's called the Babolat Play, and according to my tennis teacher who tested it, it is very accurrate and useful with the information it provides.  It provides great info on how many forehands or backhands, the percentages of sweet spots, etc.  However, it seems easy enough with the fitbit devices to supplement it with more detail breakdown of practice event, such as how many steps were taken per minutes average during the practice session, as well as the actual active seconds in an average minutes.  The goal will be to get a smoother footwork and taking more adjustments steps to get to optimal ball striking space.

[Doug]

To my knowledge, with the Fitbit devices you can't get actual active seconds in an average minute.  You can get steps for each individual minute, but I believe that is the best resolution you can get.  Originally, the Developer APIs would not grant access to the per minute stats without applying for a special partner status.  But that was relaxed to where you can now use the APIs to retreive your own per minute data. 

If you need to be able to access per minute data on another user ID (even a friend where you have other access), you still need to apply for the access.

The per minute data (or what Fitbit calls Intraday) developer APIs are described here  .

[LilBudyWizer]

Certainly you can do that with an accelerometer, but the hard part is recognizing the activity. Given an activity it isn't all that hard to come up with some useful statistics, but that's very specific to the activity. The Nike Fuelband attempts that with their fuel points.

Running would, by far, be the most popular sport. There's two products for that. The new Garmin 620 measure ground and air time. That's using an accelerometer. You're in free fall when both feet are off the ground so the gravity vector goes to zero. When you hit the ground there's a sudden spike and you start picking up acceleration due to gravity. I don't know how useful that is, but it gives some data. It might be more useful in volleyball and basketball though where you're airborn as far as misappropriating it than tennis.

There's also the ScribeLabs Running Kinematics Footpod. It tries to measure how you land on your feet and lift off. That's using an accelerometer as well. It would be a gross misappropriation for tennis since you feet turn all kinds of strange ways compared to running. It's largely the software processing the data and since you aren't running the software might recognize that and just refuse to give data. It might though give you useful data on how you land and such.

The point though is both are accelerometers just as the Fitbit is, but it's how you use it. Fitbit isn't really in the sports market. Yeah, I can see why you would want the product, but I don't see why you would want Fitbit to provide it. It's sort of like Benny and Jerries could make jelly, but it's rather an unrelated business other than it's food.