Engadget has been reporting that Nokia and fellow Finnish company Polar, a 'leading brand in sports instruments and heart rate monitoring', are planning to get together to integrate phones and Bluetooth aids such as heart monitors. Sounds good to made and a match made in heavenFinland.
Read on in the full article.
This kind of tie-up does seem to happen from time to time, Nokia did something similar with Finnish high end watch-maker Suunto where the Nokia 5140 was able to share data with certain Suunto models (their watches are practically mini-computers).
Wasn't this supposed to be what Wibree was for? Bluetooth used too much power for these cases and Wibree was invented as a low power solution.
Wibree is nowadays known as "Ultra Low Power Bluetooth" as the Wibree standards group merged with Bluetooth SIG.
I've been wondering why there haven't been bluetooth heart rate monitors, or at least a small box that can convert, for a while now. The battery life issue is valid (Polar HRMs tend to last years before having to replace the battery), but a rechargable and slower updates could fix that. Most HRMs just send your pulse electronically to a receiver that has the processing. I could see an HRM that can figure out your pulse and just send the number to a BT device.
Take this: (can't post links due to spaming rules (?)) so Google "sparkfun polar heart rate module"
glue it to this: Google RF solutions PIC processor bluetooth
Add some microcode and a battery, and you have a converter. (easy, right?)
The problem is getting it integrated into software like Sportstracker.
The only way to make this worthwhile is to get nokia to make sportstracker work with this.
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