July 2026 Product Update
Today we are announcing a major product update and improvement to how we track on-ice performance with the release of our Shift & Drill Run Algorithm V2.
Over our last two emails, we laid the groundwork for understanding the differences between Active Time, Time On Ice, Stride Time and Energy Ratio — collectively referred to as Advanced TOI metrics. These intuitively apply to Shifts in Games but also Drill Runs in Practice. For those who missed it, the quick summary is:
- Active Time tells you how long a player was out there (bench-to-bench shift length, stoppages included).
- Time On Ice tells you how much of that was real game time (game-clock shift length, stoppages removed)
- Stride Time tells you how much the legs were moving (striding)
- Energy Ratio tells you what percentage of the time a player was on the ice (game clock ticking) they were striding (legs actually pushing).
Today we are announcing a major product update and improvement to how we track on-ice performance with the release of our Shift & Drill Run Algorithm V2.
Let’s dive into what’s new!
Shift & Drill Run Algorithm V2: What to Expect
- NEW Time On Ice (TOI) metric tracks game-clock shift length with stoppages removed matching the definition used by the NHL
- Improved recognition of shorter shifts results in better capture and shift videos
- Energy Ratio calculation changed from Stride Time / Active Time to Stride Time / TOI
- This means your Energy Ratio for Games will increase slightly since TOI is always less than Active Time in Games.
- Your Energy Ratio for Practices will remain the same since Active Time converges down onto TOI in the absence of shifts in Practice.
- All of your previous sessions and baselines have been reprocessed to reflect the new TOI metric and improvement to Energy Ratio.
- HELIOS App 4.2.2 shows TOI and improved Energy Ratio for Games (UPDATE NOW).
Shift Video Editor: Giving Control to the User!
As HELIOS has integrated with all the major video and camera platforms used in Hockey, we’ve come to appreciate that some cameras struggle to keep an accurate reference to global time, resulting in what’s called “drift”.
For example, the camera says it’s 9:03:30am at the start of the video but it’s actually 9:03:23 am. This offset matters because we take the time from the camera to be truth when aligning it with your skating data tracked by our wearable and then cutting your shift videos. The reality is — sometimes the camera’s sense of time is off.
So we’ve built a new feature into the HELIOS Web Dashboard called the Shift Video Editor where you can drag a slider to correct the offset in one of your shifts, and then we automatically apply that same correction to all your shifts, snapping them all into alignment.
We felt it was best to put this control in the hands of our users due to the variability of camera drift across time and locations.
Check below to see how to start editing your videos.
Or if you'd like a direct walk through of the new Shift Editing feature, check out the video below.
What's Next?
Keep an eye out for major product updates coming in the weeks ahead as we continue to invest in making HELIOS the most powerful wearable platform in hockey!
Update your HELIOS App today to access these new updates.