Driving counts toward exercise goal

[Propagandian]

This morning while I drove to work, my Fitbit Ionic counted steps while in traffic. I did read somewhere on these forums that I could just log 'Driving' as an exercise and it would exclude the steps for that duration.

I did so, which fixed the steps problem, but now 'Driving' is added as actual exercise toward my weekly exercise goal. Is there a way to fix this?

[kdwoolfe]

This topic has come up before, although not completed addressed. Problem is that driving is an activity of sorts with steering wheel vibration and foot movement that the tracker picks up. You can add driving as an activity with zero steps and zero calories burned. There is even an app for doing it for you: DriveBit.

See:

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Charge-HR/Fitbit-counts-driving-as-exercise/td-p/1295059

[MrMarv]

@kdwoolfe and @Propagandian -

I book between 10 and 40 steps on my morning commute due to part of my freeway journey passing over surface streets where the road surface does not match the "bridgeworks" over those streets. Interesting that I rarely track any false steps on my commute in the evening over the same route.

With an average of 25 invalid steps tracked and an average of 10,200 steps a day over the last 2 weeks, that equates to a 0.002450980392157 error or 2/10s of one percent. It would have to average 100 steps a day to even get to one percent.

Personally, it is not worth worrying about, as everything else is tracked cleanly including calories burned.

Note the word "personally" in the above paragraph. Your concerns are all that should matter to you, I'm just trying to point out something to think about.

Welcome to the boards to the both of you.

[Propagandian]

I get that I can add an activity, which I did, that's fine. The point is the same as the forum post @kdwoolfe mentioned: Driving is logged as an activity, and it also adds to your exercise goals. There is a distinct difference between activity and exercise, and Fitbit simply merges the two. I don't want the app to go and congratulate me on exercising if I drove to work, that's silly.

I think the solution of adding Driving in such a fashion is a quick hack to make up for a missing feature of being able to ignore tracked data during a certain time. 

@MrMarv It counted steps during heavy traffic when the car went about walking/running speed. In my case, it was about 600 steps, and made me fulfill my hourly activity goal as well, which is wrong. It might not be significant to many people, but considering a daily commute to and from work, there's a potential for 1200+ steps error margin daily. And that's assuming I only go to work and back, nowhere else.

[MrMarv]

@Propagandian - 

I totally agree - and would not have what you probably considered "trivialized" your plight had I known what type of numbers you were speaking about. I would have to consider your numbers not only significant but outrageous.

What type of tracker do you have? You never mentioned. As you can see in my signature block, I have a wrist worn tracker which depends more on arm movement than vibration for tracking.

[Propagandian]

@MrMarv, I have the Ionic. I'm a lefty so it's on my dominant hand and it also happens that I shift gears with that hand. The steps counting while driving doesn't happen all the time though, so I'm guessing it's a mix of slow moving traffic along with all those factors that makes it think I'm walking along the highway. 

The steps thing can be sorted with a log to activity, so that's fine... I just hoped there was some way to not have it pick the activity up as actual exercise. Perhaps a checkbox to just state if an activity is non-exercise related? Or even better, just an app on the Ionic that disables counting additional data for a certain amount of time. From what I've read on these forums I already know of multiple activities that could benefit from such a feature. Someone was having steps counted as they type on a keyboard, another while doing crochet, others while driving. Even something like preparing food and waving your arm around in the process can signal step counting.

I don't know how flexible the Ionic API is for third party developers. If there's a way to disable all sensors for your "exercise", then I might look into just making something.

[admmck81]

So glad my Ionic doesn't do this, but I can understand how annoying this would be if it did.

[Livewire]

Is there a fix for this yet?

[Remriel]

Are Fitbit developers too incompetent to code an exception for driving or is the company completely apathetic to its consumer base?