Is nRF51822 suitable for fitness tracking?

[Jeff]

Since it does not have DMA or FPU, are there power or processing issues for using an accelerometer to do step counting, sleep tracking, and other fitness features? I do not want to use a separate CPU to handle the accelerometer. Does anyone know of a commercial product that uses nRF51822 for fitness tracking?

[Nils Minor]

Hi, have a look at this page www.nordicsemi.com/.../adidas-FIT-SMART-wristband-tracker-measures-heart-rate-calories-speed-pace-distance-and-stride-in-sync-with-Bluetooth-Smart-Ready-smartphones and you can read about where nordics chips are used in there ULP PDFs www.nordicsemi.com/.../ULP-Wireless-Q-Summer-2015

best regards, Nils

[Øyvind Karlsen]

Hi,

Yes the nRF51 is definitely suitable for fitness tracking. In fact, it is used in a slew of commercial products, take the latest ULP that Nils linked to as an example.

If you have an application that requires heavy processing of floating point numbers, as well as using DMA, have a look at the nRF52. It features a powerful Cortex-M4F processor with a floating point unit, the chip also has DMA for all peripherals, this makes the nRF52 a great choice when working with applications that have high digital signal processing and real time demands.

Best regards,

Øyvind

[kirkus]

Our team used MetaWear as a rapid prototyping platform for our custom wearable and were extremely impressed with performance as well as battery life; the nRF51 is very well-suited to fitness tracking scenarios. We are doing gesture detection in the firmware using a 6-axis IMU and nRF51 easily handles our calculations. As Øyvind mentioned, with the nRF52 you have even more power available if your use case requires heavy floating-point number crunching.

[Jeff]

Thanks, I will check all these out.