Speedo Straps Sensors To Swim Goggles. It Tracks All Four Strokes. Breathing Count Included, For Those Who Forget.
Speedo is launching a removable iQ module that attaches to its Vanquisher goggles. The module analyzes performance across freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. It tracks swim strokes, head movement, breaths, distance, and additional metrics not fully enumerated in the source.
This illustrates the principle of instrumented decomposition. You cannot improve what you do not measure, and swimming is particularly resistant to self-observation since your face is underwater. The mechanism here is wearable telemetry applied to a sport where real-time feedback is physically impossible to obtain mid-performance.
Speedo, the swimsuit and equipment manufacturer, is producing the iQ module for its existing Vanquisher goggle line. The coverage comes from The Verge, written by Emma Roth.
- Open the health or fitness app already installed on your phone, such as Apple Health or Google Fit, and locate the swimming or stroke-tracking section. Expected outcome: you discover your phone can already log basic swim metrics like distance and duration without hardware.
- Swim one length of any pool using a single stroke while a friend films you from the side. Expected outcome: you review the video and count your strokes per length manually, which is what the iQ module does automatically.
- Compare your stroke count across two different strokes, say freestyle and breaststroke, by filming both. Expected outcome: you observe measurable differences in efficiency between strokes, demonstrating the value of per-stroke analysis that the Speedo module provides.