Usability and Engineering Aspects of Competing RF Technologies for Communication with Commercial Sports Sensors in Ubiquitous Applications - Experimental Comparison of Power Consumption and Use Cases for ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy Sensor Devices

Hans Weghorn

2015

Abstract

The commercial market offers quite some time already personal electronic sports tools for control and monitoring of physical workouts. With these units, body measures like movement speed, tread rates, and heart rate are detected by tiny autonomous sensor units and their recordings are transmitted via RF for further processing to a central handheld device. Since a while, also smartphone apps can be used as control instance, if their ubiquitous host device supports one of the particular RF standards for coupling them to the sports sensors. During the last decade, two competing wireless standards have evolved for this sensor air link, which are called ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy. The key features of this remote communication technology determine the usability within the various scenarios in personal sports, for instance the question how many sensor devices can be operated closely to each other without interference. In this paper, the specified and advertised properties are analysed on base of the definition of these RF standards, and they are furthermore practically verified with experiments. In particular, measurements of power consumption are shown for the two different RF systems, since life time of sensor battery has relevant impact on convenience of daily use. Furthermore, practical observations of various spurious effects when using the two RF standards are reported here, which seriously bring the reliability and accuracy of such commercial devices into question.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Weghorn H. (2015). Usability and Engineering Aspects of Competing RF Technologies for Communication with Commercial Sports Sensors in Ubiquitous Applications - Experimental Comparison of Power Consumption and Use Cases for ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy Sensor Devices . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS, ISBN 978-989-758-159-5, pages 263-270. DOI: 10.5220/0005643502630270

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsports15,
author={Hans Weghorn},
title={Usability and Engineering Aspects of Competing RF Technologies for Communication with Commercial Sports Sensors in Ubiquitous Applications - Experimental Comparison of Power Consumption and Use Cases for ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy Sensor Devices},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS,},
year={2015},
pages={263-270},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005643502630270},
isbn={978-989-758-159-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support - Volume 1: icSPORTS,
TI - Usability and Engineering Aspects of Competing RF Technologies for Communication with Commercial Sports Sensors in Ubiquitous Applications - Experimental Comparison of Power Consumption and Use Cases for ANT+ and Bluetooth Low Energy Sensor Devices
SN - 978-989-758-159-5
AU - Weghorn H.
PY - 2015
SP - 263
EP - 270
DO - 10.5220/0005643502630270