Turtle Sport: An Open-Source Software for Communicating with GPS Sport Watches

Abstract

The aim of this article is to introduce an open-source software—Turtle Sport—that is capable of automatically importing the GPS traces of several types of GPS sport watches (Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Timex, TomTom, etc.) or of importing a number of GPS files. The GPS data are also uploaded locally to the researcher’s computer workstation, and not to Cloud, which may raise important ethical issues. Turtle Sport also allows users to: manage a number of users; visualize the traces and statistics for the races; and export the traces to external files (GPX, KML). Developed in Java, Turtle Sport is a stand-alone, multiplatform (Windows, Mac and Linux) and multi-language (11 languages supported) application. The software is available under GNU LGPL 2.1 Licence on SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/turtlesport/). Funding statement: The publication of the paper was supported by the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Equity (950-230813).

Keywords

• GPS watches
• Garmin
• Polar
• running
• cycling
• GPS data interoperability
• ethical issues
• confidentiality
• Java