Blaze step count inaccurate, steps not in real time.

[azrielah]

I have had a couple of fitbits and have been happy with the accuracy. I recently purchased a Blaze and the step count was off so I set the stride as directed and it is better but still not picking up steps without my arms swinging. So the small steps in kitchen or with walking and holding a bottle of water aren’t being picked up. I seem to get about 40 steps at night while I am sleeping. And the step count isn’t in real time on occasion it lags and then a bunch of steps show up. I have written fitbit it’s been 3 days with NO response. I have responded to another forum and Fitbit has been absent there as well. I have purchased 5 of their products and I am feeling like I am entitled to comment from Fitbit. From looking at the forums it appears I am not the only one who deserves a response. Hey Fitbit we are looking to you for assistance. Speak up and please help us "make every step count" after all thats why we purchsed your product.

Thanks

[verano]

I have read every bit of info I could find about the Blaze and step count.  My Blaze (original and one replacement) conistently reports, for every 100 steps, only 75 or 80 steps.  I have tried to start counting mid walk, from a cold start, dominant/non dominant hands and settings, with no luck.  Since the fitbit admins say your profile needs to be set correctly, I even tried saying I weighed 50 more and 50 less pounds than I do just to see if that made a difference.  No luck.  I have been able to change my stride setting and get a pretty accurate distance metric, but the step count, of course, is not affected by stride length and is not affected.  I have a $12 pedometer that does better.  I had to replace my Basis Peak, which was super accurate,  and was so hoping to go with a fitbit, because of the friend challenges I can participate in.  Something must be done about this, and I don't see any evidence that the Fitbit admins are taking this seriously at all, and admitting that it is a real issue.  I am truly at a loss, and would be happy to try a different model of fitbit if the Blaze can never be fixed, but really would like to stick with the Blaze.  Would it be so difficult to allow for an adjustment?  Like the stride length for distance?  I am not talking about manually adding in 20 steps every day for each 100, I am talking about an adjustment to sensitivity, kinda like the dominant hand thing, so we can tweak it ourselves so it records the correct number of steps all the time.  I generally walk on a paved flat trail, wearing walking shoes, swinging my arms normally.  This should be the one thing that the Blaze excels at, and it doesn't.  I am at a loss and quite sad.

[robersonj]

I'm really frustrated with the Blaze at the moment. I got it about 3 weeks ago, and it was wonderful for the first two weeks. The last few days, though, have been quite different. I walk my cul-de-sac loop for about an hour almost every day. I take about 430-440 steps around the loop every time (I count these steps in my head). The Fitbit has me anywhere from 257-300 steps. This loop I walk for an hour, mind you, so I am going around it about 16-18 times. I just went and walked it for 30 minutes. My S-Health app on my phone said it aws about 3500 steps (which is quite accurate from when my Fitbit was tracking it before). My Fitbit registered 2488 steps. That is a huge discrepancy. I can see being 20 steps off or so. I would have absolutely no issue with it. 

I have reset my Fitbit. The next thing I'm trying is having it on my dominant hand with the app set to non-dominant (suggested by another user). I have also contacted support, and they are sending a new device. I will try it and see how that goes. The calorie burn seems to be fairly accurate, so I do like it for that. I guess I can just log all of my information on MapMyFitness and include the step count from my S-Health app instead of my Fitbit. But I like the challenges on Fitbit—just hard to win them with a really inaccurate step count.

If you are having this issue, I would advise everyone to contact support. Continue to contact them so that they understand the issue to see if they can push Fitbit to get a firmware update. I'm sure it's just some bugs in the device. If they can get this problem solved, this will be a wonderful device.

[verano]

I will contact support again, I guess.  This is not improving with time.  I am probably going to order a fitbit Charge HR to try out, and will consider returning the Blaze if support does not admit there is a problem and give an ETA on a fix.  They really do not have to change the step functionality itself.  They only have to allow a setting for sensitivity so we can adjust it, similar to how we can adjust the distance metric using stride.

Debbi

[Rich_Laue]

Please read past posts fitbit has said that they are aware of a step count problem, and is working on a solution.

[Renee2016]

Fitbit has been saying that they have been working on this inaccurate step count ever since the blaze came out. It is extremely frustrating. I had the flex and it worked just fine, decided to upgrade and pay a lot more only to get a Fitbit that doesn't accurately track my steps. There are other features about the blaze that I like but I could have got those same features from the charge HR and spent less money. I have already returned my original pebble to Fitbit and they sent me a replacement one due to these issues. The replacement has the same problem. I honestly just want my money back.

[verano]

Will someone please direct me to any forum post posted by A FITBIT EMPLOYEE OR MODERATOR that says that fitbit is aware of the problem and is working on it?  The only references to this that I see are just users saying that.  Thanks!  -Debbi 

[bbarrera]

Thought I saw it somewhere, but can only find this recent post which is not too encouraging.

[verano]

Since my Fitbit Blaze, even after replacement, does not count steps correctly, I would like to know if the Fitbit Charge HR counts steps well. Any feedback from users of the charge HR?

[bbarrera]

@verano two Fitbit employees commenting on Connected GPS distance issues - that was the thread I was thinking of - unfortunately its not about counting steps.

[kanjjn]

I sit at a desk all day. So I get up once an hour to walk. All of a sudden I realized I had 2000 steps without much walking. I then realized that moving my hand up and down causes steps to be logged. Is there a way to prevent this?

[bbarrera]

@kanjjn you could try changing setting from Dominant to Non-dominant hand. That will change sensitivity, may or may not work. If that doesn't work try wearing on other hand if that one doesn't move?

[JeniP]

Well, I recently  bought a Fitbit One to see if it would count my steps/calculate distance more accurately than the Blaze, & it does do that, plus, it counts my floors more accurately.  The Blaze seemed to count my casual walking okay, but when it came to fitness walking with my arms swinging, it only calculated half my distance & steps.  Also, if I am to trust the Fitbit One with my casual walking at work, the Blaze is adding steps there, as well as jacking up my heartrate in some of my workouts.  I do like the looks of the Blaze watch & I like the Fitstar workouts & all the other advanced features, as well as the automatic sleep tracking.  I might end up keeping both, although, if someone was to ask me for my recomendation, I would say get the Fitbit One.

[AngelaMa]

Hello everyone! Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. If you are having accuracy issues please review  this post from @AndrewFitbit about accuracy after the next firmware update. 

Let me know if you have any questions! 🙂 

[chilehead]

Sounds like there is speculation, though absolutely no confirmation, that the new firmware might help.  I hope so.  Fitbit just sent me a replacement unit, but I don't have high hopes.

I did the same 1.04 mile walk today.  Once before work I got 2076 steps which is pretty close to what I have measured with my old (and lost) fitbit one and my flex.  I was thinking, great! Maybe the problem had been fixed by a FW update I didn't notice overnight.  Nope.   Took the exact same walk at lunch and got 1686 steps, over 400 different, so an 18% step loss.

[gordonofalba]

This email is directed at the Fitbit customer support group, i.e. nobody.

I agree there are issues with the Fitbit Blaze step count. I owned a Surge until the strap fell off and could not be replaced. My stride length IS 29" and the Surge was very accurate. Ever since I started using the Blaze the stride length has gone down about 6%--

	Total steps	Total miles	Stride
Surge:	3365944.00	1541.85	29.02
Blaze	658627.00	284.99	27.42
Difference			5.54%

The data from the Surge is from January 2015 until Juy 5th 2016, (NO relacement straps)

The data from the Blaze is from July 5th 2016 until August 15th 2016.

There are several explanations:

1. The Blaze is incorrect, (a piece of @#$%@)

2. My body shrunk 5% in ONE DAY

No changes to my stride length parameter was made in 'Settings / Priofile' which suggests FitBit has discovered a completely new arithmetic or something about the human body only discovered recently. If any of these are true perhaps FitBit will publish it in a peer reviewed journal: The "Kazakhstan Fitness Bulletin" does not count!

The Surge data is consistent with my iHealth and Garmin data, the Blaze data is not! I have also gained weight usung the FitBit because my calorie burn has suddenly gone down, what a surprise!

What I suggest is this. after replying to this e-mail with worthless assurances that the matter is being looked into and will be dealt with, why not leave it until the one night of the year when nobody is paying attention and make some surreptitious changes. This will of course serve no other purpose than to remind us how Fitbit treats it customers.

I am also having a great deal of fun with my 'sleep' data, (the random number generator), but will post this separately.

Thank you for your support.

[cinlou7]

I'm having similar issues.  Fitbit Blaze is not recording all my steps. I'm being cheated out of my steps!  Uggh!  I would definitely like to know what the company has to say about this and let us know how to resolve it ... or if the company is working on it.

[LadyBrum]

I am having the same issues.. I was on my 3rd Charge  and all 3 have accurately counted my steps. My daily steps are about average, until I just started using my New Blaze, its about 1k-1.5k steps off. My arm moving should not be the issue as my Charge counted my steps the same, with or without arm 'swinging'. I'm very disappointed in this product. 

[chilehead]

---

@LadyBrum wrote:

I am having the same issues.. I was on my 3rd Charge  and all 3 have accurately counted my steps. My daily steps are about average, until I just started using my New Blaze, its about 1k-1.5k steps off. My arm moving should not be the issue as my Charge counted my steps the same, with or without arm 'swinging'. I'm very disappointed in this product. 

---

If you still can, I would recommend returning it and getting a Charge 2.  After 2 "bad" blazes, I returned it and changed to the Charge 2.  I no longer have the accuracy issue.  Perhaps the blaze works fine for some people, but it didn't for me.  

[LadyBrum]

True I'll look into that.. The inaccuracy isn't acceptable.. Cost too much
to have issues. I stopped using the charge because it feel apart from
water damage due to sweaty workouts.

[Primadana1]

The exact same thing happened to me! My charge hr stopped working (probably due to sweaty workouts too). I was stuck using my Blaze that only counts 85% of my steps. I posted to Fitbits social media, they asked me to private message them, then to email them. After several times back and forth re-explaining myself to many different customer service people they told me the following:

Thanks for the details about the Charge HR once again.

We re evaluated the case and as we checked before, the Charge HR is not able to be replaced but what we can offer is a 25% discount but we don't know if you still want to take it after all, we understand your position about this, but we just want to let you know that that is an option.

About the Blaze, we are also working on the new firmware update so it is getting released during this days and will solve the software issues including the step inaccuracy.

We really appreciate your time and please let us know if you still have problems with the tracker.

...at this point I just wish I would have kept my original Fitbit instead of giving it away when I got my charge hr (at the time you couldn't have two devices on the same account). I guess I'll be on the edge of my seat until I see a firmware update.