Smartwatches continue to add “life-saving” technologies such as fall detection, SOS calls, AFib warnings, and the latest Loss of Pulse feature on Pixel Watches, all of which keep you safe. But there’s a less well-known and more common problem that most watches take for granted: tracking hydration and sweat loss.
I want a better hydration device on my watch, but reports last weekend of 35-year-old runner Bobby Graves dying of a heart attack after finishing the Disneyland half marathon last weekend — a day after self-diagnosed heatstroke in 100ºF heat. – brought to the forefront of my mind.
This man is my age, has run several half and full marathons in the past, and is not at an age where people worry about heart health. Perhaps the medical report will shed some light on the mitigating circumstances, but there’s a reason why the experts cited by SFGate are specifically warning people to “make sure you stay hydrated” in hot weather.
Smartwatches have the means to estimate sweat loss from workouts; Samsung even claims it’s clinically accurate. But most other brands (besides Garmin) ignore it, and the trackers aren’t good enough.
I’d say it’s past time for hydration to become more of a priority for fitness brands. Excessive heat will only worsen over time, and watches should be prepared for that.
Hydration tracking is as basic as it gets
Both Wear OS and WatchOS have several water tracking apps such as WaterMinder and Waterllama. Samsung One UI Watch has a first-party Hydration tile, and Garmin watches let you download Hydration Tracker views from the Connect IQ store.
They vary in appearance and feature niches, but they all work the same way: You open an app or tile and tap a button to tell you to drink a cup of water. The screen will show how many fluid ounces you have left to drink for the day. You can also schedule a regular pop-up reminder to check if you’ve had a drink.
This is quite useful for everyday life! But the daily water reminder does not take context into account, like how hot it is or when you have finished a workout; You have to change the target goal yourself. And the combination of drinking for hours and getting reminders can be so annoying that most people ignore or turn them off.
Some fitness watch brands like Coros and Polar let you set reminders during exercise to refuel or rehydrate, but at set intervals; again, there is no context of how much water or electrolytes your body actually needs.
Ideally, a watch will notice if the user has sweated (or is sweating) more or less than usual, and dynamically recommend that people drink more water to prevent dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Accurate sweat tracking can be used with smart watches
Earlier this month, Samsung boasted that a clinical study from the University of Michigan proved how accurate the Galaxy Watches were compared to medical-grade sensors for heart rate (90%), VO2 Max (82%), and sweat loss (95%). That’s about what I’d expect from a wrist-based optical HR sensor, but the sweat accuracy surprised me.
Samsung doesn’t track your sweat loss directly. It’s an estimate “based on your body size, age, gender, and exercise intensity, including heart rate, ambient temperature, and other conditions.” I’ve always used the sweat loss numbers after my Galaxy Watch Ultra to guess, but apparently that’s educated guesswork.
The only one directly The consumer sweat loss device I know is Nix Biosensor. It adheres to your bicep and sends your sweat down an “inlet” with electrodes at either end, calculating its “speed” to determine your sweat rate. Then it extrapolates how much sweat the rest of your body is losing, since different body parts have varying sweat rates.
The Nix sensor is potentially useful for serious athletes, and I plan to test it for a future column. But they are niche and only used in training concepts; we need mainstream smartwatches used daily to be an authority on sweat.
The Pixel Watch 3 cEDA sensor can detect “small changes in your skin’s sweat rate” for stress data, but I don’t think it’s designed to track sweat loss in general. Apple has patented a sweat sensor that will “measure the amount of fluid lost in time intervals” and show the rate of sweat loss in real-time, but the patent does not guarantee that the company can make the concept work in real life.
For now, I’d be happy if more brands imitated Samsung and Google, using heart rate and standard body data to estimate sweat loss after a workout. Eventually, though, they should go further, in line with Apple’s patents.
Picture this: Let’s say you run a half marathon with the Galaxy Watch 7 in warm conditions. During the run, the data screen will show in real time how much sweat it estimates that you have lost, perhaps calculating a new total every few minutes or every mile. At a certain threshold, maybe every 500ml of sweat loss or a customizable amount, it can buzz your wrist suggesting that you will soon refuel.
If your body sweats quickly slows down during your run, it’s a serious sign of dehydration. Your Galaxy Watch will alert you to stop immediately and rehydrate or seek medical attention, the same way it will notify you if you encounter an arrhythmia or a low heart rate.
Once you cross the finish line, the watch will provide a total estimate of your sweat loss, as of now. But it will also automatically add the amount of sweat you lost to your Hydration tile. Samsung recommends that you “replace 150% of what you lose in 1 to 2 hours,” so I figured it could easily multiply the total milliliters of your exercise sweat loss by 1.5 and add an ounce of fluid in there.
Then maybe it could send post-workout notifications at the one and two hour mark, reminding you to enter your total water intake in the Hydration tile to confirm you’re fueling up properly.
That’s my vision of how this could work. Ideally, the sweat sensor is not only active during exercise, but measures sweat continuously (like the Fitbit cEDA sensor) and starts tracking more often if you reach a threshold of sweat or heart rate, or if your local weather and humidity are special. high
It’s useful for farm workers, delivery drivers in hot vans, construction crews, and many other outdoor workers, not just athletes.
Garmin is very close to my ideal vision of useful sweat loss data, although burying the Hydration Tracker tool in Connect IQ is a shame. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can open the app’s settings and turn on “Auto-Increase Goals” to add your workout sweat loss to your default daily goal.
I tested it on my Garmin Forerunner 965, and it added six glasses of water to my daily total after allegedly sweating profusely during a 10K on a hot day. But Garmin underestimates my sweat compared to Samsung and do not follow his “replace 150%” advice. I needed more water than the Garmin thought, so it was more theoretically useful than practical.
For runners who are trying to push themselves and finish the race when their body is trying to stop them, a fitness watch should be ready to step up at any time, not just remind you at the finish line that you are sweating. a river
Instead of relying on algorithms, it would be better if they start measuring your body sweat directly for more suitable data, because quite accurate brands like Garmin and Samsung will produce different results and heart rate estimates. With sweat data, warnings to drink water or electrolytes would be more relevant.
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