Fitbit blaze giving wrong HR reading

[Siash]

I've recently had quite the health scare after looking at my Fitbit one day while settling my baby and seeing my heart rate was 35bpm. I made a doctor appointment and am waiting for a letter from a cardiologist. A few days later again while settling my baby I was checking the time and my heart rate was showing as 160bpm so was rushed to hospital where everything checked out fine! I'm now wondering if my Fitbit is broken and all this worrying is for nothing as I'm sat here taking my pulse manually at 90bpm and my watch reckons it's 160 again😞 

Any advice?

[AlejandraFitbit]

It's great to welcome you @Siash. If your tracker is not being accurate, I recommend taking a look at this post, where you will be able to find some things that might be affecting this reading and some tips to improve it. You can also, restart your Blaze.

Let me know the outcome. 

[shipo]

A couple of comments:

• Your Blaze is not a medical device and as such, any and all heart rate data should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism when it doesn't fall in line with how you're feeling and what you're doing.
• I've had a Fitbit tracker with heart rate monitoring for over three years now, and every time it has reported anomalous readings I've looked for other causes for why the readings were too high or too low.
• Today was a good example; the heart rate graph from my normal daily lunch time run shows I spent 43 minutes (of a total of 85) up in the "Peak" zone with a fairly flat line between 165 and 170 bpm.  Yeah, about that, while getting my heart rate up into the 170s isn't a problem for this 60 year old, doing so for 43 straight minutes probably didn't happen.  When I saw the graph I remembered I forgot to tighten my wrist band down one notch before my run; that typically makes all the difference.

[TerryFit]

This whole issue of faulty HR readings is so annoying and I am just amazed at how so many fitibit users just accept it. I have had my Blaze for 1 1/2 years and it has never been accurate but was at least for a while consistently wrong and I was able to make at least some reasonable adjustment the readings and (by comparing HR monitoring from other equipment over long period) work out what it should have been. However that "consistent" reading changed around 5 months ago and the totally inconsistent behavior has become unacceptable. Readings that drop to half with no reason then sometimes fail to read at all. It is an absolute mess!  

I have defended Fitbit for this poor HR readings for too long. My patience is now over because they are failing to answer my questions... their moderator just doesn't reply despite the invitation from Fitbit moderator to reply to their suggested fixes which never work.

This HR issue is a major problem and it has a flow on affect to the Calorie burn readings which are on average up to 50% below calorie burn readings from other calorie monitoring that I use in my exercises.

If this sort of problem were in an automobile there would be a worldwide recall. 

Fitbit hide behind their "caveat" that HR readings are not as accurate as for example chest monitoring devices etc. Although those kind of caveats are never presented  when they want to have the marketing advantage of their claim, that one of the  Fitbit major user functions is the HR monitoring.  So commonsense and reasonable expectations would surely be that their HR monitoring would at very least be reasonably accurate.  This is not the case at least in my experience. I cannot get Fitbit moderator to reply to my problem and I am sick of having to just accept this situation from a major International company.

[TerryFit]

It do not enjoy being critical but FITBIT need to help users like me get an answer and a fix to this issue.

This whole issue of faulty HR readings is so annoying and I am just amazed at how so many fitibit users just accept it. I have had my Blaze for 1 1/2 years and it has never been accurate but was at least for a while consistently wrong and I was able to make at least some reasonable adjustment the readings and (by comparing HR monitoring from other equipment over long period) work out what it should have been. However that "consistent" reading changed around 5 months ago and the totally inconsistent behavior has become unacceptable. Readings that drop to half with no reason then sometimes fail to read at all. It is an absolute mess!  

I have defended Fitbit for this poor HR readings for too long. My patience is now over because they are failing to answer my questions... their moderator just doesn't reply despite the invitation from Fitbit moderator to reply to their suggested fixes which never work.

This HR issue is a major problem and it has a flow on affect to the Calorie burn readings which are on average up to 50% below calorie burn readings from other calorie monitoring that I use in my exercises.

If this sort of problem were in an automobile there would be a worldwide recall. 

Fitbit hide behind their "caveat" that HR readings are not as accurate as for example chest monitoring devices etc. Although those kind of caveats are never presented  when they want to have the marketing advantage of their claim, that one of the  Fitbit major user functions is the HR monitoring.  So commonsense and reasonable expectations would surely be that their HR monitoring would at very least be reasonably accurate.  This is not the case at least in my experience. I cannot get Fitbit moderator to reply to my problem and I am sick of having to just accept this situation from a major International company.

[Magal]

Hi just wanna say my Fitbit blaze “monitors” my hr even when it’s not on my wrist, so due to this huge inaccuracy in hr, everything else is wrong as well, ie: calories burned, resting hr, fitness level etc. Fitbit should really work at resolving this problem. It’s huge. I feel like my Fitbit is useless. 

[TerryFit]

This is exactly why I finally gave up and got rid of my Fitbit.
--
Terry Rimmer
*+61 (0)418546558*

[Magal]

Hey Terryfit. Wut r u using now? Is it accurate?

Sent from my iPhone

[TerryFit]

I will not get another until I am satisfied it is accurate. I would have
liked the new FitBit iOnic but user comments do not appear positive yet. I
always wanted to stay with Fitbit but they need to fix this whole accuracy
issue.

regtards

--
Terry Rimmer
*+61 (0)418546558*