Charge 5: Automatic detection of Outdoor Bike activity deteriorated since about mid November

[Ekkart]

Dear Fibtbit Team and Community

I have my Charge 5 for about 10 month now, and what I particularly liked was the automatic detection of my "Outdoor Bike" activity (which mostly consists of my cycling to and from work every day for 30 minutes each direction). These have been detected very reliably  and with great accuracy concerning the cycling time. But, since about mid November 2023, these activities are not recognised reliably any more.  Less than half of these activities (still lasting about 30 minutes) are recognised automatically, and from those that are recognised, typically 10 or even 15 minutes of cycle time are missing (even though I am riding my bike the same as always, and about the same intensity; the zone minutes I am earning during the time of cycling and the detected pulse rate seem to be roughly the same as before according to my Charge 5).

What did change? And how do I get the automatic recognition of the "Outdoor Bike" activity back again with the earlier reliability and  accuracy?

In case it matters: I am using my Charge 5 with the Android Fitbit App (with GPS switched off on the Charge 5 and the location service switched off on the Android device); the Android device is almost always online and connected to the Charge 5 via Bluetooth).

Best regards,
Ekkart

[RiekoC]

Hello @Ekkart 

Sorry to see that you are having issues with your Outdoor Bike activity being auto-recognized. 

One thing to do is to double check is the auto-recognize settings in your app. If you would like instructions on how to do this:

• Tap on your picture/icon in the upper left of the Today page in the Fitbit app
• Tap on Fitbit settings
• Tap on Activity & Wellness
• Tap on Exercise
• On this page, you should see the list of Auto-Recognized Exercises.
  • You can tap on an exercise to change the time that is needed for your device to recognize your activity. The default time is 15+ minutes. You can change it this value, the minimum time being 10+ minutes. It might be helpful to reduce the time. 
  • You can also set an activity to Ignore, if it's one that you don't do

Although it shouldn't be necessary, you might want to do a sync so that your Charge 5 has the updated auto-recognize settings. It also might be worth doing a restart. 

Hopefully, this will get your device back to doing a better job on auto-recognizing your Outdoor Bike activities. 

[Ekkart]

Dear Rieko

Thank you very much for your reply. Except for the reset of the Charge 5, I had already checked all the things you mention in your reply. So, I did also a reset of the device on Dec. 2nd -- just to be sure that I have tried everything.

But unfortunately, this did not have any effect. My Charge 5, still misses more than half of my trips by cycle that last more than 25 minutes. And the ones, it can automatically detect are very often still cut short (by between 5 and 15 minutes); and it is mostly the part in the beginning of the trips that are cut off. This makes me think, that a new version of the Outdoor Bike detection might restart the timer for detection when stopping at a traffic light for a bit longer. I don't think that my stops at traffic lights have significantly changed; so I suspect the detection algorithm to do that. And since I, depending on timing, sometimes have three or four stops in the first 15 minutes, this might cut the trip shorter that 15 minutes, so that the algorithm decides it is shorter than 15 minutes (I stayed with the default of 15 minutes) and does not count the trip at all. Since my Charge 5 at sometimes automatically recognizes the activity, I think the reason cannot be in the general settings for the auto detection.

Any idea what I can do from the FitBit team? Was there an update of the automatic Outdoor Bike detection algorithm recently (in November). And if so, can the effect I am seeing be fixed.

Best regards,
Ekkart

[Gryllotalpa]

Same problem around the same time with my old Charge 4 not detecting walking reliably any more. Since it did not get much better with upgrade to Charge 6 ( as the Charge 4 fell apart in the meantime), I suspect it is related to some SW upgrade. what happened here?