Firstbeat Sports built with Qt (original) (raw)

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Optimize training, recovery, and performance with mobile physiological analytics

40%

of NHL teams as customers, and more from the Premier League, Bundesliga, etc.

50%

Development time saved with Qt

Athletes respond differently to training and have different recovery needs. Firstbeat Sports provides holistic physiological performance insights to make informed coaching decisions and maximize the team's performance potential and minimize the injury risks.

Firstbeat Sports' holistic performance analytics insights run on a single platform and include training load, recovery, and sleep on a nearly laboratory-accurate level.

Development challenges

How Qt Helped

"We utilise Bluetooth heavily in our product. Qt offers a cross-platform solution that supports both iOS and Android Bluetooth connectivity. We also share lot of the same codebase across the apps. With Qt this has been easy."

Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, Director of Sports Performance Products, Firstbeat Sports

How Firstbeat tracks the vitals of the world's top athletes

Firstbeat Sports collects data via a combination of ECG-based heart rate detection and acceleration sensors, an embedded calculation library, and a memory for data collection.

The sensors are connected to dedicated apps for athletes and for coaches and can be used for live streaming and data upload.

Firstbeat Device shot

The app syncs with the Firstbeat Sports cloud-based platform, where the data is analyzed, refined, and visualized to provide coaches with information on current measurements, measurement history, trends, and other relevant information.

Both coaches and athletes interact daily with their respective mobile applications, which are developed with Qt for iOS and Android.

"As a company, we have a long history of using Qt. It was a natural technology choice for us to continue using the same, trusted technology we are familiar with and that our developers know."

Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, Director of Sports Performance Products, Firstbeat Sports

How Qt optimized Firstbeat's performance

Firstbeat was founded in 2002 and has been a long-term user of Qt – ever since their initial ‘Sports Monitor’ on desktop, running on Windows and macOS.

For Ville Tormälä, development team lead at Firstbeat, having a cross-platform development framework is a requirement:

"Easy and efficient cross-platform development is a must-have capability for every company today offering a product for a group of end-users with different devices and platforms. Having the technology support for this is important since it’s also a major cost if not done deliberately, and Qt provides great support for that."

The cross-platform development option is just as vital today with iOS and Android as their primary targets. In addition, mobile devices came with another set of opportunities.

A steady Bluetooth connection is crucial to gather reliable data and turn them into actionable insights. The Qt Bluetooth module provided them with an efficient solution that was easy to implement and carry over to the different platforms.

Qt and QML offered Firstbeat very efficient and easy-to-learn tools for user interface development. The designers used Sketch to build the wireframes and imported them to Qt Design Studio, where they could quickly fine-tune, test, and implement the actual user interface. This process helped the developers focus more on the business logic.

Firstbeat is using a commercial version of Qt 6, as the algorithms used in the Firstbeat app need to be carefully secured to protect the investment in their product long-term.

Read More about Qt on Mobile

Qt Design Studio made it very efficient to develop the first prototype version of the application and finalize the user interface. Once the UI was ready, it was a lot easier for developers to bring the app to live.

Ville Törmälä, Developer Team Lead, Professional Sports Products

Firstbeat is the leading provider of physiological analytics and services for well-being and sports. Firstbeat transforms heartbeat data into personalized information on exercise, stress and recovery. Over the course of two decades, they have helped over 10,000 organizations and thousands of sports teams worldwide to reach their health and performance potential with science-backed confidence. Today, Firstbeat services are offered in more than 70 countries.

Do you also want the best for your team of top-tier development athletes? Blow the whistle and give us a shout.

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