A little background, I am a middle school health teacher and I have been for the past 7 years, however, before that I taught physical education for 6 years at the elementary level. I currently work closely with our physical education department and am the Google/Technology resource person for student/teacher-facing software at our school.
Our Phy. Ed. department utilizes Polar heart rate monitors and software to track student effort/progress throughout the year. The heart rate monitor they currently use is the Polar A370 ($150+) (Amazon.com) and the software they use is called Polar GoFit ($0-$500/year) (Polar GoFit User Guide for Teacher).
Essentially, they use the combination of these two tools to track and measure students’ “time in zone”. Heart rate zones are are pre-programmed into the watches via the app so that students’ can see what zone they are in as their heart rate rises or falls.
The reason why I am sending this is because this Polar program seems to have no competitors. Our Phy. Ed. department came to me today and informed me that Polar informed them that they no longer make/sell the A370 model they were using previously and now the only model they can buy is an updated version that costs $300+ (this doesn’t appear to be true but it is what the salesperson informed us). Our school serves 1300+ students each day, but our budget is not sufficient to meet the rising cost of upkeep related to these watches along with other needs.
If Wyze is interested, my suggestion would be to enter the education market and the tracker/software/app would essentially need to do three things:
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Wrist-based heart rate & step tracker
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Tracker must easily display current heart rate, time in zone (programmable), steps taken and the current time.
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Android, Web/PWA, iOS application that anonymizes student names so that heart rates can be displayed via tablet/computer/projector without displaying student names.
- Currently Polar does this by assigning Watch #1 to Student “A” and Student “A” knows which heart rate is his/hers on the display because it is noted on the watch (we manually number them with a marker). Then watches are sanitized and utilized for the next class that comes in each hour. The tracking session is reset on the app and the new class is able to come grab their watches and get to work. Polar has an option to upload each students’ name and ID, but our PE teachers prefer to keep track of this manually (on paper) because it is really clunky and doesn’t sync with our Learning Management System if a student drops the class, etc.
If this product existed at a reasonable price point, I think Wyze would sell millions of them (I realize I’m just one person with that perspective)–we would certainly buy them.