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Is the Garmin CIRQA band suitable for raw accelerometer signal data collection?

The screenless Garmin CIRQA band is perfectly designed for blinded data collections where it is important that participants do not get distracted or change their behaviour. It also excels in data coverage by supporting a vast amount of data types such as steps, sleep, workouts, heart rate, beat-to-beat-interval, skin temperature and many more. 

We have asked ourselves if its 3-axis accelerometer can also be leveraged for collecting raw motion signal data.

This article describes our findings. In a nutshell: yes it can be used but there are some limitations to consider.

Test Setup

In our test, we have configured the following data collection profile in Fitrockr:

  • Standard data (default setting)
  • Raw & Enhanced BBI
  • Heart Rate at 60s
  • Stress at 60s
  • Respiration at 60s
  • Skin Temperature at 60s
  • Accelerometer at 25Hz

Storage

The Garmin CIRQA band comes with a storage capacity of 128MB. A heavy data collection profile that includes accelerometer can generate up to 100MB of data per week. This means that the CIRQA bands should be synchronized with the Fitrockr platform weekly to avoid data overwrite/loss. 

The Fitrockr synchronization can either be done via USB-cable to a laptop (recommended sync method) or via Bluetooth to a smartphone. Due to the high amount of accelerometer data, Bluetooth sync needs to be performed multiple times per day which will be automatically conducted by the Fitrockr mobile app. The important aspect here is that the smartphone needs to be in close range throughout the day to allow continuous background syncs. If this is not the case, Bluetooth protocol can be become overload by the amount of data. In this case, Bluetooth syncs would take several hours to complete or could even permanently fail. 

Battery

The Garmin CIRQA band is advertised with a 10 days battery capacity. In our heavy data collection profile test, battery was consumed at TBC% per hour which equals a total battery duration of TBC days. This battery reduction is mainly caused by the raw accelerometer sensor data collection at 25Hz. 

Verdict

The Garmin CIRQA band is very suitable to collect raw accelerometer data at 25Hz. The additional battery drain impact is within an acceptable range. The only caveat is the limited storage which requires a data sync at least weekly.