Inaccurate step, over sensitive!!

[Fletch88]

Hi
Before I take my blaze back as I feel let down does anyone else experience way over step count, I drive for 2 hours to work each morning and it added 250/300 steps this morning? Had done 1000 before I left home and barely walked around the house? I know it's on my wrist but how are you meant to track steps if it's counting everything you do with your hands? is the surge this inaccurate as well?

[Rich_Laue]

The Blaze is on your arm, and is only able to monitor arm motions. In the same way a pedometer such as the Fitbit One is mounted on the body, and is only able to look at the motion of the body. Neither device looks at the feet.

So how does it count steps, it is looking for movents of the arm that would normaly happen while your feet are walking. Your fitbit is also designed to count steps if your arm is not swinging but is moving up and down with your feet as you walk. This is the same up/down motion in the car that give you steps. 300-400 steps during a drive i would not worry about, youll find that other points of the day you will be walking and the Blaze isn't detecting it.  It all averages out over the course of the day/week/month. 

As for detecting steps while driving, this happens with every pedometer on the market, with mabe the exception of those $5 dollar mechaninal ones

[MikeS1971]

My Charge HR and Blaze also counts steps while I drive. What I drive depends on how many steps it counts. While driving my Camaro, it can count 600 to 800 steps on my 20 minute drive to work. If I drive my Suburban, it counts around 200.

[bbarrera]

Trackers use 3 dimension sensor (accelerometer) to determine steps. Its very easy and accurate for a tracker to recognize steps when mounted on your hip (like original Fitbits like Zip and One). 

The problem with wrist mounted devices is that the tracker "sees" motion from both walking and arm swings, and that makes it difficult to accurately count steps. There is a lot of research into solving the problem, for example table 2 from this TI filing shows true steps versus counted steps in 11 wrist scenarios and 2 hip mounted scenarios. You can see from that table that for TI's original step counting algorithm (designed for hip), sometimes the wrist worn tracker is accurate and sometimes not.

Its a difficult problem to reliably track steps from the wrist for every person on the planet, Blaze step counting accuracy is going to be hit or miss depending on how each person walks. If it works, great! If there are a lot of errors then just know that you'll get different results with different trackers (Blaze vs Alta vs Zip vs One vs other brands).