Swimmo Swim training watch

I’ve been following the Swimmo project for a while now – ever since I backed their Kickstarter project last year.

“Swimmo is a next-gen smart swim watch. Monitor your swim. Set goals to stay on track. Swim smarter with IntensityCoach™, PaceKeeper™ and heart rate monitor”

I already swim with a Swimovate PoolMateHR which counts my laps and lets me download the data to my PC. It has a heart rate strap but I’ve never been able to use it as it instantly falls off while swimming, so it’s only usable under a wetsuit. The watch however doesn’t work in open water (it relies on a push-off-the-wall action to determine distance), so I’d have to wear a wetsuit in a pool to use the HR monitor. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg failure.

The Swimmo is different though. It detects your heart-rate through your wrist using LEDs. I’m really interested to see this in action.

The Swimmo also has a beautiful curved OLED display which really makes it stand out from the crowd. I do hope it doesn’t drain the battery too much and that it can still be used as a watch throughout the day like my PoolMateHR can.

The Swimmo also has no buttons at all. It works by detecting sharp rotating motions of the wrist (turning your hand so it’s palm up and back again) and taps to the watch body. I’m not sure how intuitive this will be in the real world.

One of the other features I’m looking forward to using is the integration with the Apple Health feature on my iPhone 6.

My other swim watches have a dedicated USB dock which is used to download the data to a computer. The Swimmo uses Bluetooth so this process should be much smoother.

The software I currently used to analyse my swims is pretty clunky and full of annoyances. I’m hoping the Swimmo software and Health app integration is an improvement.

The quote and images in this article are the property of Swimmo Inc. and were taken from their website Swimmo.com. If you want to get involved in the Swimmo Kickstarter campaign or pre-order a Swimmo, go to the Swimmo Shop