Category Archives: ConnectStats Documentation

Multiple Profiles in ConnectStats

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ConnectStats allows you to maintain multiple profiles. This can be useful to either track several users or now several services independently.

You access the profile setup from the settings view, the blue arrow 2 below

ServiceAndProfiles

You will then see the list of profiles existing in the app. It will start with only one named Default. Each profile will maintain its own list of activity and service setup.

You create a new profile by using the New Profile line. It will the prompt you for the name of the profile. Please avoid using special characters in the name. You can then simply tap on the profile you want to activate at any time.

Here is the list of profile in my current setup. You can see I created profile for different service setup and other accounts in garmin connect I use, as well as for the activity of friends.

Screenshot 29 03 2014 10 14

If you use the Delete Activities or Profile, this will let you either completely delete the current profile or some activity in the profile. Note that deleting activities here, is only locally in the app, not on the remote service, at the next refresh the activity will be downloaded again. It’s mostly useful if you want to make sure you refresh many activities from the remote services at once.

View or manage cache is simply a way to see how much disk space the app uses across the different files it keeps.

Comparing activities in ConnectStats

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My activities are often on the same paths, so I wanted a way to compare activities. Of course segment in Strava are really useful in finding out how fast you can run or bike certain route, but I wanted a bit more control in what I was comparing. I also wanted a way that is not over complicated within the UI flow of connectstats. Here is what I came up with.

To compare an activity you need to first mark the activity that will compared to any other activity you will then look at. For that, you slide an activity in the list to the left, which reveals the Mark button.

Markactivity 6

After you press the button and the activity is then marked, note the mark icon on top of the activity icon.

Markedactivity 4

You can then look at any other activity and the graphs of the marked activity will then appear in the background of the current activity. Here I am looking at activities where I skied up the same slope with skins. It’s clear the first one my heart rate was much higher than the compared one. It was pretty much the same path up, so really just show how I adapted to the altitude over the course of the week, I think… Look at the HR histogram

SkiupHRHistogram 3

Or the rolling best plot

Skiupbestrolling 3

Now of course I claim I took the same path up, or did I? Hit the map and the two paths will appear. The compared path is slightly less opaque

Comparepaths 2

Here you see though large part of the ski up was the same, I didn’t start from the same exact same place, but arrived at the same destination.

Data relationships in a single activity

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Here we’ll explore different ways to look at two different attribute together in connectstats.

Let’s say we want to look at how the speed and heart rate relate to each other. The first approach is simply to plot the two series together on the same graph as below.

2fieldsplots 12

The arrows 1 and 2 shows that on the two short interval when the running speed increased, the heart rate increased as well.

One approach to relate the information a bit better is to use a color overlay to show the one information on the a single plot

2fieldsasline

The arrow 1, shows where the line becomes darker and red as the heart rate increased with the speed, the arrow 2 shows the heart rate slowing down as the color goes back to the green

The last and, in my opinion, most interesting way to relate the two series of data is the scatter plot.

Scatterplot 17

Here you can see the points (arrow 1) where the speed/heart rate increased together. Array 2 is the beginning of the run with lower heart rate until it stabilised in the region of arrow 3 for most of the run. The regression line shows how the main relationship between the 2 data goes, here slightly to the downward slopping as expected.

It is also interesting in the lap view to see where in the larger scatter plot a given lap appear as below

Scatterlap 9

The green points show for this mile lap that the beginning was quite fast/high heart rate (arrow 1) and then slow down of both speed and heart rate (arrow 2), and clearly at the lower end of the overall speed of the run.

Historical Scatter Plots I like to use

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One of my initial motivation to write the app was to look at my activities using scatter plots. I was especially interested in looking at the relationship of heart rate and speed.

Here you can find information how to access them.

scatter-hr-pace

The first thing I look is where is my last activity in my overall history. Here you can see that I was in the middle of the pack, a bit on the high heart rate side.

Screen_Shot_2014-01-18_at_17_44_54-6

 

It’s also interesting to check the pattern overtime. You can see here that the more recent colors are on the higher HR, slower pace area. Not good, I need to improve.

Screenshot_19_01_2014_22_25

Sometimes it can also be useful to check only the recent history, using this button to rotate between all, 1m, 3m, 1y

Screenshot_19_01_2014_22_31-4

Other times, I also want to have a more sophisticated filter for the graph, in that case I can use the search feature. If I define a search in the activity list I can then get the scatter plot only for those activities. The statistic tab will have an extra button beside running, cycling swimming and all: Search.

Screenshot_19_01_2014_22_34-2 Screenshot_19_01_2014_22_35-2 Screenshot_19_01_2014_22_36

Some other interesting historical relationship to look at for bikers: Power and Cadence or Power and Heart Rate

Screen Shot 2014-01-18 at 22.57.28 Screen Shot 2014-01-18 at 22.57.46

 

Best Rolling Plots

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Critical Power Plots

I discovered recently the concept of Critical Power Plot, after a user left a comment on the site. Critical Power is the maximum power you can maintain for a given period of time. The concept seems mostly used by cyclists. But it felt to me it could be extended to other data: What is the best pace I maintained for any given period of time? What is the maximum heart rate I maintained for a given period of time?

So I decided to give it a go and implement it in ConnectStats. All I had to do was maintain a rolling average every X seconds and keep track of its maximum. It’s quite an expensive computation: for N points, I need to do NxN computations, and the devices processing power is a bit low, so I chose 5 seconds for X, which seems to work well in practice even on my old iPhone 4.

Of course, the original data in the file produce by the watch isn’t nicely produced every 5 seconds and for the algorithm to work efficiently, I have to resample the original data at the average on that exact interval, which can result in a bit of loss from the original file. But in practice it didn’t appear too bad on most of the ride I looked at.

I end up with a new time serie evenly spaced every 5 seconds: the maximum average heart rate over 5 seconds, over 10 seconds, over 15 seconds, etc, etc.

Just had to come up with a name, cyclist refer to it for the power field as Critical Power, but “Critical Power” or “Critical Pace” felt a bit confusing to me, so I named it “Best Rolling Heart Rate” or “Best Rolling Pace”

Here is the example from my best 10k race for the heart rate.

doc-detail-bestrolling-hrplot

 

This is quite nice and works also for power or pace.

Best Rolling Laps

Of course the plots are nice, but the next thing I wanted to know was for that best HR what were my others statistics for each of that given period of time where I reached that maximum?

So I enhanced the auto lap feature to show the best rolling lap corresponding to a few arbitrary periods of the plot. Below you can see the details for the Best Rolling Power or Critical Power of a friend, along with the distance, speed, HR for each of the correspond section of the ride.

doc-detail-bestrolling-lapsdoc-detail-bestrolling-lapchoices

 

 

 

The last missing piece was to plot on the map and highlight on the plot of another statistic where that best average was reached as below

doc-detail-bestrolling-lapdetail