Athletes respond differently to training and have different recovery needs. Firstbeat Sports provides holistic physiological performance insights to make informed coaching decisions and maximize the team's performance potential and minimize the injury risks. 

Firstbeat Sports' holistic performance analytics insights run on a single platform and include training load, recovery, and sleep on a nearly laboratory-accurate level.  

How Firstbeat tracks the vitals of the world's top athletes

Firstbeat Sports collects data via a combination of  ECG-based heart rate detection and acceleration sensors, an embedded calculation library, and a memory for data collection.

The sensors are connected to dedicated apps for athletes and for coaches and can be used for live streaming and data upload.

How Qt optimized Firstbeat's performance

Firstbeat was founded in 2002 and has been a long-term user of Qt – ever since their initial ‘Sports Monitor’ on desktop, running on Windows and macOS. 

For Ville Tormälä, development team lead at Firstbeat, having a cross-platform development framework is a requirement:

"Easy and efficient cross-platform development is a must-have capability for every company today offering a product for a group of end-users with different devices and platforms. Having the technology support for this is important since it’s also a major cost if not done deliberately, and Qt provides great support for that."

The cross-platform development option is just as vital today with iOS and Android as their primary targets. In addition, mobile devices came with another set of opportunities. 

A steady Bluetooth connection is crucial to gather reliable data and turn them into actionable insights. The Qt Bluetooth module provided them with an efficient solution that was easy to implement and carry over to the different platforms.

Qt and QML offered Firstbeat very efficient and easy-to-learn tools for user interface development. The designers used Sketch to build the wireframes and imported them to Qt Design Studio, where they could quickly fine-tune, test, and implement the actual user interface. This process helped the developers focus more on the business logic.

Firstbeat is using a commercial version of Qt 6, as the algorithms used in the Firstbeat app need to be carefully secured to protect the investment in their product long-term.