Demo & Guide: BlueHeart – Broadcast heart rate (HR) from Apple Watch to Peloton Bike or Tread via Bluetooth BLE – Peloton Buddy
A long-standing complaint among users of the platoon has been that despite there being a heart rate monitor built into the apple watch, it does not have the ability to transmit its heart rate signal in the same way as the bike or peloton tread. to receive. without this, you cannot store your heart rate data in the same activity recording on a platoon device without a secondary heart rate monitor. an apple & platoon user (#spins_for_carbs) finally decided to do something about it and created a custom app as a solution. the result of his work is the blueheart app for iphone and apple watch (link to app store).
app is freemium: free to purchase, with ads that can be turned off with a $9.99 in-app purchase ($6.99 for a limited time). The biggest drawback of this app is that it requires both your phone and your phone. watch to be used to transmit the signal to your bike or platoon tread (and hopefully soon to the peloton rower as well), but that’s a small price to pay for being able to connect heart rate data from your apple watch the platoon. The process involves running the BlueHeart app on your watch, which sends your heart rate data to the BlueHeart app on your phone. the blueheart phone app captures the time signal, re-encodes it into a format the platoon can read, and retransmits it via bluetooth ble. The bike or peloton tread then reads the heart rate data from the phone, which is actually a real-time relay from your Apple Watch. In our tests, there was no noticeable lag in what Platoon displayed for heart rate and what our Apple Watch displayed.
Do you want to try it? You will need an iPhone that supports iOS 13.1 (iPhone 6s or later) and an Apple Watch with WatchOS 6 (all Apple Watches except the original Gen 1 model). If you meet those requirements, simply follow the guide below or scroll down for a video demo.
step by step guide on how to pair your apple watch heart rate with a peloton bike or tread
- download blue heart. make sure the blueheart app is showing on both your watch and phone.
- open blueheart on your apple watch
- choose the type of activity you’ll do (spinning, running or rowing ) . then you will see a prompt to open blueheart on your phone.
- open blueheart on your apple iphone
- a window will appear telling you to get your water bottle. press start.
- if you haven’t done the update in the app, you’ll see an ad. close this.
- then you’ll see a message telling you to connect to your computer. will look for “blue heart” or “<your phone name>”
- on your peloton bike or tread, open the heart rate monitor window [this appears when you’re in the view window preview of any workout ].
- After a few seconds, a device should appear. for most people it will be called “blue heart”, but for some people it will be the name of your phone.
- press connect next to the new device.
- after a few seconds , it should display a connected message and you are now ready to go. once you start the workout, it will use the heart rate data from your apple watch.
if you want to see this in action, just watch the demo video below (also available on youtube):
As a bonus, at the same time your heart rate is being transmitted to the peloton, your Apple Watch is recording an activity and progressing towards your Activity Sounds in Apple Health. One problem we found with that app is that if you previously set up your platoon profile to sync with apple health, using the blue heart to also log the ride will result in 2 workouts being generated. the developer is aware of this issue and says a fix should be released in the next version
We wanted to see how accurate blueheart was, so we decided to put it to the test. we did a 45 minute power zone endurance workout, with an apple watch on one arm, recording the peloton with blueheart, and on the other arm, we had a scosche rhythm+ recording heart rate data through a wahoo bolt. after we finished training, we entered our data into the dcrainmaker analyzer (click here to see the data for yourself) and made an overlay of the two heart rate recordings. our verdict? quite successful! the only major discrepancy we see is in the first 1-3 minutes, with the scosche recording slightly lower.
We focus on the peloton on this site, but it’s worth noting that blueheart should also allow your apple watch to stream to any other fitness equipment or gym equipment that supports bluetooth heart rate monitors, from mirror, hydrow, lifefitness, precor, wahoo, garmin, trainerroad and more.
FAQ about how to connect apple watch & platoon with blue heart
Which apple watch models support transmitting your heart rate to the peloton?
Apple Watch Series 5, Apple Watch Series 4, Apple Watch Series 3, Apple Watch Series 2, and Apple Watch Series 1 can transmit your heart rate data to a peloton bike or treadmill with blueheart. the only apple watch that is not supported is the original gen 1 apple watch. this is because it cannot be updated to watchos 6.
how accurate is heart rate data from an apple watch? should I use another wrist strap or chest strap instead?
dcrainmaker did extensive analysis and found the Series 4 to be the best in class for a wrist-based optical heart rate monitor. he noticed some quirks with the 5 series, but they may have been fixed by now. If you’re still interested in a different type of heart rate monitor to use with the platoon, you can check out our accessories page to see some of the best ones used by the community
how secure is my data? Are there any privacy issues?
The developer claims that it does not store personally identifiable information. as they say:
blueheart is designed from the ground up to focus on privacy. blueheart is a gdpr, ccpa and apple complaint with no tracking. we use the app every day. we care about our privacy as much as you do, so your data is your data. we do not want it and we do not upload personally identifiable data to our servers. We also use best-in-class advertising partners that are also GDPR, CCPA, and Apple No Track compliant.
blueheart is now available on the app store; take a look and tell us what you think. feel free to leave any suggestions for future improvements in the comments and we’ll make sure to pass them on to the developer.
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