COMPARING THE VALIDITY AND OUTPUT OF THE GARMIN FORERUNNER 310XT AND RUNKEEPER ANDROID APPLICATION IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT 1
Adamakis Manolis & Zounhia Katerina2 1
PhD candidate in Sport Pedagogy
2
Associate Professor in Sport Pedagogy and Didactics of Physical Education
Department of Physical Education and Sport Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 41, Ethnikis Antistasis street, 17237 Dafne, Athens, Greece. Correspondence: Adamakis Manolis, 00306972907064,
[email protected]
Keywords: GPS, smartphone, reliability, technology, fitness, physical activity.
Physical activity (PA) is important for the prevention of many diseases and health maintenance. Various strategies have been proposed to encourage populations to become more physically active. Two of these strategies are the use of Global Positioning systems (GPS) and the use of third-party mobile applications, which allow users to track their fitness activities via GPS from their smartphones. GPS provides a better understanding of the spatial context of PA and when it is combined with a heart rate monitor it becomes valuable equipment for measuring PA and energy expenditure in a non-controlled, outdoor environment (Duncan et al., 2009; Krenn at al., 2011). Comparatively, fitness mobile applications have the potential to accurately measure a number of health behaviors and promote PA (BortRoig et al., 2014). The purpose of the present study was to compare the accuracy of distance, speed, pace and energy expenditure between two GPS devices: Garmin Forerunner 310XT and Runkeeper application installed in an Android smartphone. A 33-year old male trainee wore Garmin on the wrist and the smartphone on the same hand, while running in an urban environment setting. He conducted in total 25 running sessions, with an average time 20 mins 46 secs±52 secs. The accuracy of the distance was compared against 3.58 km urban course which was measured using a Leica DISTO D810 laser rangefinder. The average heart rate of the trainee during the practice was 154.64±3.48 bpm. Pace was calculated for each kilometer separately. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (t-test, ANOVA).
The ANOVA for distance was statistically significant (F=13.53, p
