Charge 5 Step Count is wildly inaccurate!

[Stevieyz]

On 1/10/21, I attended a church funeral service, then a luncheon afterwards.  Then I drove home 50 miles, logged in and worked remotely at my desk for the rest of the afternoon. I never left my house and did very little walking all day.  While I was watching the NCAA National Championship football game, my Charge 5 congratulated me for reaching 10,000 steps.  Say what?!!!!

While I don't have any other devices that track step counts, I have noticed my Charge 5 records very different step counts for the same basic walk that I do when weather permits.  Is there anything I can do to make the Charge 5 Step Counts more accurate?  I've already tried re-setting the device.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide!

[DavideFitbit]

Hi, welcome to the Community forums, @Stevieyz. 

Thank you for all the information that you've shared about the inconvenience you're experiencing with your Charge 5 and the troubleshooting steps that you've tried. 

Keep in mind the algorithm is designed to look for intensity and motion patterns that are most indicative of people walking and running. When working at a desk, cooking, or performing other activities with arm movements, a device on your wrist may add some steps. When you’re doing activities that involve arm movement, such as working or cooking, you often walk a few steps in-between stationary periods as well, so the device tries to give you credit for those steps. For most customers, the number of extra steps added by arm-based movement isn’t significant when compared to your overall stats. 

If you're also getting extra steps while you're driving, unfortunately it is an expected device behavior at the moment. There's currently no Driving Mode feature to avoid these extra steps, however, I do recommend that you vote for this idea posted in the Feature Suggestion board of the Community, this is helpful for the team of developers. 

In addition, if you still consider the steps are not accurate, please make sure that you've tried the restart procedure as described in this article, then check if you continue to experience the same behavior. In the meantime, you can find more useful information about the accuracy of Fitbit devices and how to adjust your stride length and dominant hand settings here. 

Hope this helps, I'll be around.