Your Fitbit fitness tracker might be lying to you
thememo.com
thememo.com
> However Teresa Black, along with two other claimants, is arguing that her Fitbit reported a heart-rate of 82 bpm while her personal trainer recorded this at 160 bpm.
I find it somewhat hard to believe that you can be this oblivious as to your own heart rate, especially at high levels.
[Edit for personal anecdata] Also "approaching the maximum recommended heart rate for her age [...] may well have exceeded it, thereby jeopardizing her health and safety" seems a bit far-fetched - I'm not a small fellow by any means and I struggle to get my heart rate up to my max (~180bpm), much less over it[1]. My highest recent was avg.173bpm, max.184bpm for an illness-recovery 10km.
[1] Unless the Garmin HRM is having one of its moments where e.g. it claims I'm sustaining 250bpm for 4 hours.
Hmm. I'm pretty overweight and can easily go over 180bpm if I'm not watching myself on the treadmill - 5 minutes at 10-11kph will do it.
I'm keenly aware of when my heart-rate rises, I notice it jump if I sprint up a stairwell. When it gets too high I can feel the pressure in my neck and temples. I'm the most out of shape I've ever been at this point in my life and I'm alarmed sometimes at how often my heart-rate stays high after seemingly inconsequential physical exertion so I'm wondering if it's something you tune out when you're really out of shape or overweight.
Anecdata: Last summer I was considerably heavier than 77kg, carrying 5kg of stuff, walking 51km in 10 (hot sunny) hours, and averaged 105bpm (max of 119bpm).
If there is a question about your heart you go to the cardiologist and get a stress test where you have an ECG attached and maybe also they look at your heart with ultrasound and if your are healthy nothing untoward happens.
If you are not healthy there is a risk of arrhythmia and other things that can go wrong. The risk of this is certainly higher if you are older, but young people, even teens, sometimes have sudden cardiac death under stress.
Anyway, I have seen the old electrical types of heart rate monitors do something like this, where the heart rate seems to bounce back and forth between the true rate and 1/2 the true rate and probably there are situations where the monitor picks up every other beat for some reason.
I have a Suunto Ambit (GPS, HR strap, altimeter, barometer, etc) and a Fitbit Surge HR I got for Christmas. Sometimes both work, sometimes neither works. You use it for what it is. Typically when they both get a good signal, they're reporting the same figures.
Let me guess, the claimant wasn't wearing the Fitbit the recommended 2-3" above her wrist bone at the time.
Are you sure you don't have an arrhythmia? My HRM used to do that; turns out I was experiencing supraventricular tachycardia (SVT). I didn't have any symptoms other than my left atrium going bonkers due to a rogue electrical signal in my heart (no lightheadness, no pain, no noticeable loss of athletic performance).
Oddly, the only HRM I've never (knowingly) had any spurious readings from was my Polar S625X (a decade ago.) Which may be because (IIRC) it had a much lower sample rate than the current Garmin.
Various things affect HR, for example race-day HR is usually 10BPM higher than normal. For this reason HR is more of a helpful secondary metric for an sport with 'real' metrics like speed/distance/weight.
Did the fitbit put her at risk? Only if she ignored all other signs of overexertion or danger, like chest pains, dizzyness, pounding heart beats, etc.
In terms of heart rate accuracy, HR straps aren't always accurate either depending on placement, body and ambient temperature, moisture etc. Certain heart conditions can cause the strap (or maybe more accurately the software processing the data) to significantly underestimate heart rate too.
[1] http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2016/01/fitbits-multiple-lawsuits...
* they were all within 5bpm
Hopefully there'll be some sanity with how this is handled...
I've checked the reading three times by comparing with my radial pulse, counting against my wristwatch. Each time it was bang on, or within 2bpm.
That's when fairly inactive, though. Will have to check it's consistent at much higher pulse rates.
e.g. Monday was Fitbit:13293/9.54km, Garmin920XT:13612/10.6km, iPhone:12529/9.8km.
Tuesday was similar - Fitbit:24305/19.85km, Garmin920XT:21928/18.6km, Moves:22097/18.2km
As far as I can tell, steps/calories is roughly accurate (eg, not off by much more than, say, 10%) compared with other devices (my chest strap HRM+GPS device, stationary trainers, bicycle computer). Close enough for consumer use.
I echo the poor battery life. I forget what it's rated at, but I get barely 3 days. My old Nike Fuelband was rated at 7 days but I could push it over 2 weeks.
As for heart rate you would think it is easier but again I guess it would depend on the fit around the wrist and the position on the wrist to determine it accurately.
I don't really understand why people are suing over this. If your heart rate is 160 and your Fitbit is saying it is 80 then you return it for a refund or replacement. You don't train yourself to death.
It is a bit like if your sat nav says drive a across a field then into a river.. you should be using your judgement - not deferring it to some device.
If you are struggling to catch your breath or feeling a bit funny then typically you would ease up rather than run yourself to death on a devices say so. I would hope that most people are smart enough to determine that if they can feel their pulse pounding and the monitor says you are barely above resting heart rate then something is probably incorrect with your device.
In the 1970s he was a computer mechanic, with a spanner and oil and all that kind of stuff. There were only two of those computers in the country, one at Raleigh Cycles and one at Cabdury Chocolate. They used them to do the wages. They had an agreement that if one broke he or his opposite number could jump in a car and drive to the other with a box of cards to run the batch and then fix it later.
He used to take me to work on a Monday night and it's where I got interested in computers. He stopped working in 1978. I wish I had been old enough to understand it more. I was 6-8 at the time.
But that's a sync problem, not a Fitbit problem.