Abbott tells CES it’s getting into consumer biowearables | TechCrunch
From the article:
A lactate biowearable is in development to track continuous lactate build-up during exercise, which can be used as an indicator of athletic performance.
If they can make the libre (used by supersapiens) or similar sensor continuously measure lactate, I think it has massive potential for endurance athletes. Lactate testing is a PITA right now, but I would argue its well proven (just look at Iden/Blu) to be very effective for training.
If they go direct to consumer, they may crush supersapiens or they might keep partnering or buy them for the software. Anyway, that is much less interesting to me than portable, continuous, real-time, (relatively) cheap lactate monitor.
So my (rudimentary) understanding of the science is that it’s possible with the same enzymatic substrates. At least, there are lab bench top instruments that measure both glucose and lactate at the same time. There are challenges to making it a long wear consumer device, and as someone who wore the very early Medtronic sensors you won’t want one of these not ready for prime time. But the idea is promising and abbot has the track record with libre.
The idea of continuous lactate is really promising. It won’t replace your power meter. Power is an input and reads instantaneously. Lactate is a response and the current abbot sensors read every five minutes and even if broadcast frequency was increased lactate tau is like 30 seconds. It could replace, or be a strong compliment to, a heart rate monitor. It’s a more direct measure of the metabolic system being stressed. Whether people will want to stab their arms to avoid hrms is to be seen, but some purple really hate hr straps.
To me it would be a ton more helpful than a glucose monitor. I’m still to be convinced a cgm tells an otherwise healthy athlete to do anything more than eat as much high quality nutrition as possible. Lactate is actively changing throughout a workout or race.
many years ago, some bike magazine asked a bunch of gurus what the future of the sport was. different people said different techy things (nanotech! variable geometry!) but one guy (maybe gary fisher?) said “information.”
i think we’re getting close. it’s all a lot to digest, but i’m imagining during an ironman, you’ve got a heads-up display on your helmet visor that’s constantly cycling through blood pressure, lactate, glucose, HR, watts, drag, hydration status, core temp . . . all of it.
if you could actually use that data you’d be a lot closer to absolutely maximizing your potential. if the price was right i think i might be interested, at least for a little while. if nothing else it’d be cool to do a handful of test sets and see where my lactate is, and then maybe try again at the end of a big block.
whether that’s the direction we want the sport to go in is another question.
To me it would be a ton more helpful than a glucose monitor. I’m still to be convinced a cgm tells an otherwise healthy athlete to do anything more than eat as much high quality nutrition as possible.
Outside magazine had an recent article on CGM and I got to the end thinking that nothing in the data stood out at something very actionable/if it was (e.g., bonking) you might have already dug a deep enough hole that the lag would have reduced the usefulness. Only data from one person, so maybe there are cases where it is more useful (and the takeaways at the end seem to point to retrospective analysis for planning vs real time feedback).