Polar Starts to License Their Sports & Fitness Algorithms

Polar has launched a website aimed at selling their sports/fitness/physiological algorithms to other companies. With this new venture, they aim to make it possible for other sport/fitness/etc. companies to leverage Polar’s algorithms. This could be used in areas such as sleep, activity tracking, training load, recovery, and more. In other words, if you wanted to make your own watch, called the Banana Watch, you could do so and utilize Polar’s health/sports algorithms to power it (note, don’t make a sports tracker called the ‘Pear’, that already exists).

This licensing road is well traveled for other Finnish companies, with Firstbeat previously doing this for many watch and wearable manufacturers over the years. Of course, Garmin acquired Firstbeat about 2.5 years ago, and the current Firstbeat site doesn’t exactly give the impression they want business anymore (there’s not even a contact option, though on their privacy/legal/accessibility pages, they do have e-mails there, so I suppose you could use that). Still, in checking with Firstbeat/Garmin, they did confirm they do still indeed license Firstbeat algorithms, including new business opportunities.

In any case, all of this semi-recent change clearly opens the door for a company like Polar to step in and fill that void with their own (and similar) slate of algorithms.

As a quick bit of background and explainer on the segment, historically, we’ve seen many companies license Firstbeat algorithms in the wearables space. For example, Suunto, Amazfit, Huawei, Mont Blanc, Casio, and many others have used such algorithms for years (at CES in the past they even had a massive display full of them, along with a huge website listing every device and which algorithms). These can be for simple components like VO2Max estimation, or calorie expenditure. Or, they can get more complex like Training Status, Race Predictors, and so on. Typically you’ll see companies that don’t specialize heavily in sports tech devices pick up the basic and mid-range algorithms, whereas the more sports-tech-focused companies aim for the more complex algorithms.

Generally speaking, companies license these algorithms on a per-unit volume basis, usually with discounts for bundled sets of algorithms (e.g. a suite of things designed to work together). They report these sales volumes in a catch-up method down the road as they sell devices. Certainly, that can lead to scenarios where competitor companies are afraid to report unit sales volumes (such as the case once Garmin bought Firstbeat, or now with Polar’s algorithms). Though practically speaking, most companies roughly know how many units their competitors are selling.

Finally, there aren’t many players in this space. There are some players like Valencell and LifeQ, but they also focus heavily on bundled sensor+algorithm offerings. For example, buying an optical HR sensor package and then getting various algorithms with it. Still, they have standalone offerings too. For example, Suunto has shifted to LifeQ for its optical HR sensors in recent years (from Valencell). But all of these companies tend to flirt with a host of business-to-business offerings, sometimes kinda appearing as spaghetti thrown at the wall. Not in a bad way, but usually they see business opportunities in adjacent health/fitness/sports/medical areas, and try and plug those holes.

In any case, with that background out of the way, let’s talk about Polar’s offerings.

Polar’s Algorithms:

So, what’s Polar offering? Well, according to their site they’ve got 25 different algorithms that are available today, these algorithms are chunked into the following categories, according to Polar (their descriptions below):

– Activity: Tracking activity 24 hours a day helps customers learn how they move in their everyday life

– Training: Monitoring training gives your customers in-depth insights they can act on, and work to improve

– Performance: When your customers know their key performance metrics they can focus on how to perform better

– Sleep: Improve your customer’s sleep insights to ensure they rest better and are fully recharged each day

– Recovery: Guide your customer’s optimal recovery so they can be ready to take on their goals for the day

– Wellness: Help your customers restore balance to their lives through holistic well-being and rhythms

As you can see, these are pretty generic categories, without a ton of details. One can imagine sleep would include not just sleep times, but probably some of Polar’s various sleep metrics around ANS, HRV, and sleep phases. It might even include SleepWise components. It’s hard to say. Below these categories they have some details on the next steps and how their process works:

All of this makes sense and is fairly straightforward for algorithm-focused companies. As you can see, they’re not just giving a snippet of code (or compiled binaries) and calling it done. Rather, it’s also validation that the algorithms are doing what you’d expect. Some of these things aren’t super obvious at first glance. Sure, testing what time you went to sleep and woke up is easy. But having test cases for training load/recovery is much more complex, and wanting to ensure that your activity/workout data pipeline is correctly feeding the algorithm is important.

With that in mind, I reached out to Polar, hoping to get slightly more information on Step #1 above, specifically the feature descriptions. These high-level descriptions certainly wouldn’t be confidential. Unfortunately, Polar said they don’t have anything more publicly to show.

Just for context, competitor Firstbeat lists not only the algorithms on their website, but also detailed descriptions and user interface examples (hey, they might not list a way to contact them, but at least they list what they have for sale – with fairly specific detail). Here’s one snippet of the 26 algorithms that Firstbeat says they currently offer:

Of course, whether or not this is Firstbeat’s whole catalog, I don’t know. Some of it is semi-new, but other Firstbeat-driven features/algorithms are missing. That might be because they haven’t updated the website, or, because Garmin has decided not to license those. For example, we don’t see HRV Status features or Jetlag Recovery, both of which are driven from the Firstbeat team.

Now, setting all that aside, one common thing I hear from people (no matter the company) is that all these algorithms are “junk” or “useless”. And essentially, I bucketize those complaints into three basic categories:

A) Legitimate cases where the algorithm just kinda sucks and is heavily shortsighted for most people (Whoop Recovery score is a good example of this)

B) Legitimate scenarios where the algorithm has edge/use cases that don’t work well for a smaller portion of the population (e.g. Polar SleepWise not accounting for naps, as an example)

C) Cases where users don’t like or understand the data output, or misapply it (an example being Garmin’s previous training/status that is/was easily misunderstood)

For most of Polar’s algorithms, I find they tend to do a good job of what they say they’re going to do – if, and this is a big if – you actually let them, and are willing to understand them. In some ways that’s on the company to make easier to understand. It doesn’t matter how good the algorithm is, if it’s easily misunderstood or misapplied. Also, keep in mind that in this context I’m setting aside the underlying data stream (e.g. optical HR sensor or GPS/accelerometer data if applicable). That matters in cases, again, such as previous generation Whoop devices where the optical HR sensor was so bad that the end-state strain/recovery data was useless. These days, that’s less of a factor (to Whoop or most others).

Linked off of Polar’s algorithm licensing page is their Polar Research Center, which until recently I’d never even seen before. This is quite cool, and has tons of links to both internal and external studies. Even the internal studies whitepapers are far better than what Garmin (or Whoop, or Oura) publishes. Sure, they’re mostly only going to publish ‘good’ data, but hey, at least they’re publishing details of how the feature works beyond just a marketing paragraph.

In fact, if I were to take a guess here, my assumption is that most of the algorithms they’ll license will probably line up near perfectly to the tidy little list shown under the ‘Whitepaper’ section of this site:

That list linked above would most closely align with what I’d expect Polar to offer/license, and would be most competitive to what Garmin/Firstbeat offers.

Going Forward:

I think this strategy actually makes a ton of sense for Polar. There are a lot of companies that have leveraged Firstbeat over the years, but as Firstbeat is no longer independent, it makes sense that these companies would prefer not to give Garmin either revenue or sales numbers (even if the unit volumes are pretty much known anyways). Polar has a solid slate of algorithms that do compete very well in the marketplace, and would be super appealing to companies like SRAM/Hammerhead or Wahoo, which lack any physiological features at all. While some consumers might prefer it that way, the market reality has clearly shown that having at least some of those features is required to compete at the same price point.

But it’s also appealing to companies that are direct competitors. Companies like Amazfit, Suunto, and others could see Polar as a better option in terms of either pricing, or competition. After all, if I was Suunto, I’d much rather give Polar the money than Garmin. Sure, it’s a drop in the bucket, but in most cases it’s better to have more smaller companies than less. And plus, they’re both from Finland – that has to count for something. Sauna credits perhaps?

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes, and how long it takes for Polar to have their first public customer. Obviously, Polar wouldn’t have spun up this business unit/offering unless they already had some interested customers (or perhaps already signed customers). I’m sure time will tell.

With that, thanks for reading!

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