Lactate meters are literally a pain to use because you have to prick your finger and draw blood onto a test strip.

Lactate meters cost around £500 to buy and then each individual test strip costs around £2 per use making it expensive to get data points.

I’m really keen to use lactate testing within my training to accurately train at my lactate threshold. Do other athletes care about this information as well?

Before potentially wasting a lot of doing work on the product design, app and smartwatch integration I wanted to see if anyone else was interested in this product. I created a landing page which clearly set out the vision for the product. The page directed users to a waitlist to signup. With minimal effort I quickly designed the product built the landing page and got over 50 sign-ups.

View Staging URL: https://hemo---wearable-lactate-meter.webflow.io/

I had a number of world class athletes who have been to Olympic & Paralympic Games, World & European Championships and elite marathon runners sign up and register interest some were even willing to endorse the product on the website.  I spoke with as many people as possible who registered interest to better understand what they would like from a product like this.

50+ sign-ups is not hugely significant but this was achieved with minimal effort, no paid ads or social media content. I felt like this was enough to indicate demand, I also had a clear idea on why people want this, what they think is a fair price, what price would be so cheap that they would question the quality or too expensive that they would not be able to afford it. I now need to figure out how to deliver this product.

Offer convince for the user since they would be able to easily take on and off the device but there are no approved micro-needle lactate sensors available in a consumer product yet.

It is possible to take the filament sensor design of a continuous glucose monitor and convert it to detect lactate. The device would be single use for around 14 days and measure lactate 24/7, around every 60 seconds.

Continuous Glucose Monitors offer stable readings, hopefully it is possible to also achieve similar results but for lactate.

We want the lactate monitor to have the shortest latency possible. Based on CGMs a 2 to 3 minute latency is achievable. The App could push back reading to match the latency so the data is accurate and in line with activity data (speed and pace).

I had a quick whiteboard session where I mapped out the app features. My aim was to select the features which are the simplest to deliver but provide the maximum value to the user. The app may seem very basic but it leaves room for improvement and additional features. One clear choice I made was making the user manually set LT1 and LT2 zones. I felt like early adopters are likely to already know these values from V02 max testing. A follow up feature would be adding a step test and algorithm which automatically calculates their zones and shows how they shift over time. I then went and made some low fidelity app and smartwatch screen designs.