watchOS 7 brings a variety of new features to the fitness tracking capabilities of Apple Watch, including a new Dance workout type. In a new interview, Julz Arney from Apple’s Fitness Technologies as elaborated on what it took to develop the Dance workout type with accurate calorie tracking and more.

In the Workouts app on Apple Watch, each of the 20 top-level workout types “uses a smartly-tuned algorithm that understands the workout you are doing to give you the most accurate metrics for each one,” Arney explained to HT Tech. For this reason, it was important that the new Dance workout type adheres to the same standards.

The Workout app on Apple Watch is one of the most used apps, and each of the 20 top-level workout types uses a smartly-tuned algorithm that understands the workout you are doing to give you the most accurate metrics for each one,” Julz Arney from Apple’s Fitness Technologies team told HT Tech.

Apple faced several challenges during the creation of the Dance workout algorithm, primarily because movements in dance aren’t predictable or repetitive:

“Creating an algorithm to give accurate calorie credit for dance was a real challenge for a few reasons,” Arney said. “Movements in dance aren’t always repetitive or predictable like they are in walking and running, so what the sensors can detect strictly from the wrist is not necessarily the whole story,” she added. For dance, the watch needs to detect how your “whole body is moving”.

To track calories through the Dance workout type, Apple is using what it calls “advanced sensor fusion.” This combines data from the accelerometer and gyroscope to “detect the difference between dancing with just your arms, just your lower body, or when you dance with your entire body.”

watchOS 7 is currently available to developers for beta testing, and a public beta should be available sometime this month. Do you plan on installing the public beta once it’s made available? Let us know down in the comments!

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