April Newsletter

Dear Beta Tester,

March has been unbelievably busy for us and we have many interesting updates tell you about! The pace of innovation at Baron is still high and we’re developing lots of momentum.

We’re sharing with you key updates that you’ll be most interested in. You can also stay close to new developments by following us on on Facebook and Twitter.

Our Vision for Xert

We wanted to make sure that everyone understood where we want to take Xert. Our goal is to make Xert an essential tool for all athletes by providing them with clear answers to the following questions:

What’s my fitness?
What do I do to improve it?
How am I progressing?

Providing answers to these basic questions requires that we take all the underlying algorithms and regression methods and distill them into clear and understandable information and guidance – a tall order given the amount of complexity and data involved.

In addition to being an essential tool for managing your fitness data, we also believe that Xert should be fun to use. Providing you with positive reinforcement when you have new breakthroughs, and showing you how your fitness is improving both relative to yourself and to others is what makes the pursuit of new levels of fitness fun. We hope you not only benefit physically from using Xert, but that you will also find using our analysis tools and the experience with Xert enjoyable and engaging.

We hope you will support us in continuing to bring new innovative products and services to you. Please use your social media channels to tell your friends about us. Xert is an entirely new way to look at fitness data and we need your help and support to fulfill our vision – to provide everyone with essential and motivational insights into their fitness, training, progress and performance across all areas of sport and physical activity.

Here are some key updates on our software:

Xert of ConnectIQ

Much excitement has been expressed with the introduction of our Garmin ConnectIQ apps. This is a key focus for us as we can provide the benefits of Xert to you in real-time on your Garmin Edge and other devices. Thanks to all the support from Garmin to help us get these apps out!

MPA and Colour-Coded Power	This is available as a datafield pair. MPA is displayed along side power data which is colour-coded. Fitness breakthroughs are shown as medals.
Fat and Carb Utilization	This is also available as a datafield pair, showing both fat and carb utilization either in watts or as a running total in grams.
Time-to-Exhaustion and Time-to-Recovery	This too comes as a datafield pair, showing both Time-to-Exhaustion (TTE) and Time-to-Recovery (TTR). The app also has other configurable options making a powerful display field for use in racing and training.

Xert Online Web Application

We’ve recently made significant improvements and additions to Xert Online (www.xertonline.com), both user-facing and behind-the-scenes:

Improved Analysis and Performance

Our team has done fantastic work on error/data spike detection and performance of the server to make the analysis of your data better and with faster response times.

There has also been a lot of work done on fitness signature extraction and the processes that manage your progression data. We’ve made tremendous strides in eliminating errors and in making signature parameters more accurate. SInce many of the changes we made are in the first-time-login process, as an early-adopter, you may still be seeing numbers that may not be correct or that can be made more accurate. Please consult our FAQs or ask us for help. Once Xert gets setup properly, it should just work activity-by-activity.

Calendar View

In response to users that have asked to see their activities on a calendar, we’ve added this capability. The calendar shows your activities by month/week/day, colour-codes the activities with fitness breakthroughs. Clicking on your activity shows you your signature on that date and allows you to open the activity.

Table View

Advanced users will be happy to know that we’ve added a detailed activity table. The table can be filtered and sorted in a variety of ways. You can perform bulk delete operations. You can even export to the data to CSV or XLS to load into other software. Keep your finger on this feature as we’ll be adding new capabilities to it to provide those of you that are power users (pardon the pun) additional capability to do more with your data.

Other Updates

Workout Downloads	Workouts can be downloaded in ERG and TCX format for playback on other software. (Please thank Jason DeLorme of InsideRide.com for contributing his software for this).
*TCX File Uploads*	TCX files can be uploaded for analysis.

Xert Mobile

Xert Mobile continues to set a very high-standard of performance, reliability and capability within the Android app domain. We’ve addressed a few minor bugs and have added some nice new features:

*ANT+ FE-C Support*	Xert Mobile now controls your ANT+ FE-C equipped trainer and enables you to play Xert’s unique MPA-based workouts. Get pinpoint accuracy on your training using this feature.
*Power meter calibration*	Power meters can be calibrated within the app directly.
*Lap, Food, Drink and Incident Events*	These are recorded and displayed on Xert Online.

Videos, FAQ and Xert Users Group

We’ve also made new updates to our FAQs as well as published a set of instructional YouTube videos on using Xert.

*FAQs*	http://new.baronbiosys.com/?page_id=1241
*Videos*	https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-ibNSKuGVWHi5SROailGp_S9wUbEqc19

Please join the Xert Users group to get the latest updates on new features and capabilities, offer new suggestions for features, and share your experiences with others on how to best use Xert to improve your fitness and performance.

New Features in Development:

Clubs, Coaches and Teams

Many of you are part of a community of athletes that either ride together, race together, work with a coach or perhaps just share experiences and updates about your fitness.

We’re developing the ability for you to share profile / activity / signature data with others such as coaches or team members. Once you’re part of a club, you’ll be able to see how you’re doing relative to your teammates, for example, and share feedback on progress and performance.

Coaches and their athletes will be able to share information where coaches can comment on activities, update their athlete’s fitness signature and help them decide on workouts they can use in their training.

More ConnectIQ Apps

We continue to invest in the development of new apps for ConnectIQ. Here’s what’s in the pipeline over the next few weeks:

*Focus and Strain*	These two unique Xert values will be shown as pair as they go hand-in-hand. Focus will provide a view as to which combination of your fitness variables is being exercised. Strain will show how much strain you’ve accumulated – both being the essential aspects needed for tracking your training.
*Cadence Optimizer*	As an enhanced way to view your cadence, this datafield will provide indication of when you are pedaling too slow or too fast and when you should change gears.

Advanced Analytics

The next release will see additional improvements to how we analyze your data to provide key perspectives on your performance and fitness:

Slow-Recovery Fatigue Modeling

Modeling of fatigue over longer activities will be an aspect we will tackle. Slow-recovery fatigue generally recovers hours and sometimes days after you finish your activity. We’ll be showing you how this fatigue appears in your data and we’ll also be providing you information on what you can do to improve your recovery from the activity.

Soft-Pedaling Modeling

You may have encountered situations where, during activities such as criteriums or races that have high-variability, Xert may sometimes slightly overestimate your fitness. This happens because during periods when you soft-pedal, it acts as a way to improve your recovery from high-intensity efforts.

We’ll be including an adjustment in our model to account for this.

Strain Progression Chart

Your Progression Chart is currently based on stress, i.e. on the work you do in your activities. We’ll be adding the ability to see your Progression Chart in terms of strain. This will provide a new dimension to your analysis: how difficult are the activities you are performing and how are they affecting your fitness and performance.

Our Future Roadmap

Beyond our first release, we will continue to add new capabilities and features, furthering the execution of the vision we have for Xert:

*Robo-Coach*	By taking the increased transparency Xert provides on your day-to-day fitness, focus and accumulated stress and strain, we can look to provide automated coaching capabilities. We plan to take the execution of training programs to a whole new level by enabling your training to be dynamically determined based on your current fitness, focus, stress, strain and rest together with your goals and time availability. With Xert, optimal workouts will be identified and adjusted continuously based on current fitness level, what you’ve done previously and where you wish to be – all in the context of your time availability and motivation for training.
*Xert Mobile iOS App*	Many have been asking for Xert Mobile on iOS, and we’re planning to develop this over the coming months. Xert Mobile for iOS will enable Apple iOS users to take advantage of the advanced gauges and metrics we have on display as well as being able to play Xert’s unique fatigue-based workouts. Stay tuned!
*Machine Learning*	What causes fitness breakthroughs? What amounts and types of stress, strain and rest do you need prior to achieving a new level of fitness? We plan to answer this question.
Heart-Rate Analytics	As many of you know, our heritage stems from the analysis of heart-rate data. Analysis of heart-rate data is very, very hard. We know this because we have the models and they aren’t that simple. Part of the issues with analyzing heart-rate data is the identification of each individual’s unique heart rate response characteristics. Automating this identification is needed in order to map heart-rate data to Xert’s fitness determinants in a scalable fashion. It is this automation that we’ll leverage much of the knowledge and software infrastructure we have developed. Providing users with deep analysis of heart-rate data will bring the value of Xert to a much broader audience. We feel we’re ready to tackle this challenge and will look to make this a top priority in the near future.