Review of the Motionize SUPerior paddle sensor

[ukgm]

you can't zip tie it on?

Like my vaaka sensor, I taped mine on with electrical tape.

[ukgm]

Hard to get the demand if the product isn't useful.  99 bucks is not expensive, but it's a lot to get blade angle.  As to side count, I don't know anyone who cares about that. And I'm not sure what I'd do with blade angle data.

What would you do with strain gauge data?

Calculate power output. And having used power meters in cycling for over 10 years, that is a huge game changer.

[ukgm]

For me, the blade angle data is the most attractive feature. I'm getting more and more convinced that having a good blade angle at the catch is key to speed - at least for me.

The price is good too. But I would want to be able to easily put the sensor on and off a paddle via a clamp system. I don't want to be sticking anything on my paddles and I want to be able to switch between them easily (I have different paddles for different boards, activities, and conditions).

I need more time with it but on the whole, it promised much but they never performed a proper market analysis.... Or maybe the market is the strava crowd, not the trainingpeaks type.

[burchas]

Forget the power meter, when we mentioned that to them, it seemed like it was the
first time they heard about the concept.

They did promise to include stroke depth metric which is what I wanted.
The fact they don't have that metric, makes the whole angle of entry useless
as they didn't figure out how accurately analyze when blade entry happens.

That means the software is really guessing the paddle angle, but since many people start to
pull the paddle way before it's fully planted and many actually start the pull while really catching
air as we showed them, the whole notion of the angle fell apart since they didn't have a way of
determining where is the paddle in relation to the water or at least they weren't able to
explain it.

So what I'm really left with is a bulge on my paddle that gives nothing that my Vivoactive HR
can't, maybe the left and right analysis that Garmin could add in a second. The fact that
it really had to be jimmy rigged to my paddles (I use 3 on regular bases) didn't help, it soon
found its way into my gadget junkyard along with my Va'aka etc.

[Luc Benac]

That is really too bad. It would have been a great tool going further than the SpeedCoach and giving so much information on the stroke...

[suptracker]

I would think they could generate an "Implied Power" number from the data they are collecting.  It wouldn't be as accurate as something from a strain gauge but it would allow "like condition" comparisons.  Not sure how they are going to get a depth of stroke measurement without a complete redesign.  And if they do that, don't you really need a graph showing instantaneous power so you know how you are distributing the power in your stroke.

[PonoBill]

Force and Power are easy to calculate from acceleration and mass (F=ma and power is just force over time), but the issue is what increment of force are you going to measure and where you will measure it. With a doppler GPS you can get fairly small increments of velocity, but it's not instantaneous enough to give a complete picture of what the paddle, board, and person are doing.

Mounting a GPS on the paddle isn't a solution since the paddle has different amounts of movement relative to the board depending on the time slice of the stroke cycle. You'd need board speed, paddle speed, total weight, and acceleration data and some pretty sophisticated and/or custom calculation to get anything useful from it.

A strain guage-based power meter could give some interesting data and would work well in conjunction with the typical sensor measurements (speed, stroke rate, acceleration, etc.) but all of that begs the question "what will you do with the information".  It takes a lot of sensor data and some really good analysis to make sense of a dynamic system like this. And once you make sense of it, what do you change?

[blueplanetsurf]

Quickblade inroduced a "smart paddle" that uses the motionize sensor inside the paddle, so there is no outside sensor, a good idea:

[ukgm]

I would think they could generate an "Implied Power" number from the data they are collecting. 

Some cheap devices in cycling have attempted it (as have apps such as Strava) and its generally so far off the mark, it's useless.

[ukgm]

A strain guage-based power meter could give some interesting data and would work well in conjunction with the typical sensor measurements (speed, stroke rate, acceleration, etc.) but all of that begs the question "what will you do with the information".  It takes a lot of sensor data and some really good analysis to make sense of a dynamic system like this. And once you make sense of it, what do you change?

If it's a power value, you can quantify your training load more accurately and control your training prescription more scientifically. That bit is actionable intelligence. The issue though is that power in both cycling and running meters doesn't have to worry too much about efficiency. However, in SUP there is so there is genuine concern that paddlers could get too hung up on maximising their inputs (the power output) but not be willing to compromise this for improved paddling technique.

[ukgm]

That is really too bad. It would have been a great tool going further than the SpeedCoach and giving so much information on the stroke...

I've now been using one for 3 weeks and it will be coming off my board shortly. The reason is that the side to side stroke percentage is unreliable, water spray can trigger the screen hopping to something you don't want entirely, the speaker can't be heard when paddling easily, I can't customise the on screen metrics to what I need in a race and the app is so poor, I can't evaluate much (if anything) post paddle. The paddle angle in real time is useful when working on technique but that's it. This device needs a considerable amount of work in my view.

For the time being at least, I'll be sticking with a speedcoach.

[Bean]

Is it possible to lock the screen and use wireless headphones with Motionize?

[ukgm]

Is it possible to lock the screen and use wireless headphones with Motionize?

You could lock it off but the fact you can't have blade angle, distance per stroke and other key metrics together on the same screen at the same time is frankly nuts.

[PonoBill]

I would think they could generate an "Implied Power" number from the data they are collecting. 

Some cheap devices in cycling have attempted it (as have apps such as Strava) and its generally so far off the mark, it's useless.

Power doesn't need to be implied, it can be directly calculated from knowing acceleration and mass. So applying the most power--by having Rob Rohas doing the paddling--is obviously going to win races...  ...Which of course is why he's world champion.

What you actually want (perhaps) is force, not power, and you need to measure it in every section of the stroke. And then you need to relate all those instantaneous force measurements to overall  performance of each stroke.

To be individually useful (without some hugely experienced coach and perhaps a team of nerds doing data analysis) the device needs to integrate all that data and translate it to ultimate performance.

We're not talking about a bike, where the power is applied to a relatively constant speed over a single cycle of the pedals and the interface between the power source and the ground is efficient and doesn't slip. We're talking about a craft subject to much more drag, which decelerates in the time between strokes and must be accelerated against drag that increases non-linearly as speed increases, with a paddle that needs to catch before being pulled and can only efficiently apply power over a short percentage of the full stroke.

Just knowing "yay, I pulled harder" isn't going to do much. But I'd still like to have that. And this device won't do that.

Yeah, I'm sticking to speedcoach as well.

[yugi]

I agree, effective power (the result of mass accelerated) would suffice for me. As you pointed out the measure needs to be taken from the board. I'd definitly like distance per stroke. Maybe a garmin watch would suffice for me but I like the idea of buying a cheap sensor unit and using my smartphone as the brains and screen. Since I have one anyway.