Hi, @Englelisa45 , if your Fitbit is registering steps during charging, it sounds like it may not have a good connection with the charger. Does it actually show that it is actively charging when you plug it in? (you should see a battery symbol indicating the level of charge). If it is not properly connected with the charger, or if it comes loose, then it may pick up vibrations from you or others moving about the room and will interpret that as steps. Always make sure the connection with the charger is good and that when you gently tap you can see the battery charging icon.
If you are not seeing it charging as expected, please have a look at the help article that asks, Why isn’t my Fitbit charging? You will find it here .
Some steps recorded while sleeping is normal - in fact it can be a helpful indication of whether you did a lot of tossing and turning while you were sleeping. Have you checked your sleep data in the app? Does it indicate that you were very restless? Between 100 - 200 steps overnight is probably not unusual, but I agree that 352 does seem quite a lot.
If you feel that your Inspire 3 is not counting your steps accurately, then you can test this. Fitbit recommends going outside, carrying nothing in your arms, and with your arms hanging naturally by your side, first stop and take a mental note of the steps already recorded on your device. Then begin walking normally for 100 steps, counting each step as you walk. When you have walked 100 steps stop and note how many steps have been added. If your Fitbit is working as expected you should see an additional 95 - 105 steps added. As mentioned above, the Fitbit is designed to be 95% accurate, with a 5% margin of error either way.
Like all wrist worn trackers Fitbits can be affected by arm movements, so that may affect its accuracy to some extent. Ideally you should wear your Fitbit on your non dominant wrist. There is a setting in the app (it’s connected to the Fitbit settings, so from the opening screen of the app click on the smart phone and watch icon top left to navigate to the settings for your Inspire 3. Since I tend to “talk” with my hands quite a lot, I find I keep my Inspire 3 more accurate by wearing it on my non-dominant hand, but changing the setting to say it is on the dominant one - even though it isn’t. Setting it to dominant hand will alert the algorithm to expect more than usual hand movements and to make the device a little bit less sensitive. Hopefully this should result in fewer false “steps”.
It is also true that sometimes your Fitbit will miss your steps - for example if you are pushing a cart at the grocery store, or walking on very soft carpet, or walking fewer than 5 steps and then stopping. Usually over time this will balance out. I once ran a test for a month wearing my wrist worn Fitbit against a body worn pedometer (at the time rated the most accurate one on the market) because I, like you, was that the Fitbit was over counting my steps. At the end of the month my wrist worn Fitbit and the body worn one were within a few hundred steps of each other, meaning the average error from the wrist was very small indeed. I am willing to put up with error at that level in order to have the advantage of heart rate monitoring and the other stats that the Fitbit provides.
I hope this helps!
Sense, Charge 5, Inspire 2; iOS and Android
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