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Request: Higher-Frequency IMU Access on Apple Watch for Sports Performance Apps
Hi everyone, I’m building a sports performance app for Apple Watch that uses the onboard IMU to analyze swings and impacts in sports like tennis and golf. The goal is to estimate club/racket head speed, ball speed, and shot quality in real time from wrist motion data. With Core Motion, I can currently get deviceMotion updates at ~100 Hz. While this is fine for general movement tracking, the actual ball impact happens much faster — 5–10 ms in tennis and ~0.5 ms in golf. Many of the high-frequency vibration/impact components are missed at 100 Hz, making it hard to directly measure or more accurately estimate certain performance metrics. Questions for Apple / community: 1. Is there a way to access raw accelerometer and gyroscope data at higher sampling rates (e.g., 500–1000 Hz) on Apple Watch? 2. If not, is this due to hardware limitations or an API/software constraint? 3. Are there any research, partner, or beta programs that allow deeper sensor access for sports-science use cases? Even modest increases in IMU sampling could unlock more accurate ball-speed estimates, impact force analysis, and strike-quality detection without needing external sensors — making Apple Watch a best-in-class wearable for precision sports analytics. Happy to share more about the current approach, sample data, and potential use cases if helpful. Thanks, Max
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