If that is a fact
For sleep floor and steps it works well.
Why cannot we pare the ionic with an external chest strap?
If this is possible we can use the ionic during exercises?
We then also can trust the calories.
So we will have more confidence in the total performance 
your opinion??
Best AnswerHere's an example of readings from the very same session. You can easily see a pattern of spikes in the Polar reading. Beginning includes a warmup, then three regular spikes and the... my phone rang and I had to go back to the office 😉 It was intense HIIT circuit training. Fitbit readings are a mess.
It really depends what my session is and how much of arms and wrists are involved. Still, it's alright I think for day-to-day use but pity that Fitbit doesn't support external HR monitors so such errors can be corrected by overriding the readings.
Best Answer8km Afternoon walk in our beautiful Amsterdam The Netherlands.
Polar H7 time 02:03:53 8.24 km Avg HR 83 Max HR 105 374 cal
Ionic time 0.2.05.05 8.45km Avg HR 101 Max HR121 931 cal?
Your op[nion?
@SunsetRunner wrote:Here's an example of readings from the very same session. You can easily see a pattern of spikes in the Polar reading. Beginning includes a warmup, then three regular spikes and the... my phone rang and I had to go back to the office 😉 It was intense HIIT circuit training. Fitbit readings are a mess.
It really depends what my session is and how much of arms and wrists are involved. Still, it's alright I think for day-to-day use but pity that Fitbit doesn't support external HR monitors so such errors can be corrected by overriding the readings.
Best Answer@MariusH Burnt calories is a bit different story as it cannot be really measured accurately no matter what. The heart rate is measurable by hardware. There are physical beats which can be detected using many methods( ECG, optical ). However, how much energy we spend is just an estimate. Polar and Fitbit use ( probably ) different formulas so there may be a difference in what you see in the end. Also, updating weight, height, resting HR ( Fitbit updates it all the time, chest strap doesn't as it is not something you expect to be wearing at rest ) may be taken into account but lack of proper updates may affect the final numbers. In my case, Polar H10 and Ionic, when there are no big differences in readings, they go almost head to head ( during one of my treadmill sessions they even ended up with the very same number of calories! ). In your readings, it looks like H7 underestimated your efforts. Due to the technology it uses, I still think it took better readings of HR than Ionic but calories... well it looks way too few for 2 hours walk ( unless most of 2 hours you did spend in one of Amsterdam pubs 😉 ).
Here is another example. Yesterday, I did a short 15 minutes spinning session. Moderate speed. Mostly, I wanted to stay in the fat burn zone, but three times I elevated my HR to 150bpm. Despite the first few seconds, Ionic caught up and as you can see the accuracy is acceptable:
Ionic - 94kcal
Polar H10 - 100kcal
6kcal difference? Any of them may be a bit off so this is totally acceptable. It also explains probably, why @erikkai can see results so accurate during spinning. Simply, because it seems to work quite well for this particular use case.
Best AnswerWhen I think I'm getting somewhere with understanding how Ionic deals with particular activities then I encounter results like from today, which tells me one thing - just bin it. I use extracted HR data from both, Polar H10 and Fitbit Ionic, with custom software I create data sets that can be analyzed by anything that reads CSV files. Here it goes. First, I ran on the treadmill 5k distance and ( without terminating exercise ) I added (1m plank, 30sec pushups, 30sec rest)x3. On the 5k distance, the initial pace was 5:00 then increased to 4:30 and I tried to keep my heart rate between 150-160ish:
Despite keeping my pace steady this time Ionic went totally bananas. I made sure I was wearing it correct all the time. Polar graph matches exactly all the efforts I put into this part of the workout and 3x(plank, pushups) are well visible at the end. Ionic readings are... well very creative and artistic, less real. When I thought it couldn't get any worse I moved to the weight machines:
On the Polar graph you can see every single set. It's all logical. Exercise increases HR which then declines during rest. Counting spikes you can say there were 5 exercises, each had 3 sets. What can you tell looking at the Ionic graph? First, what the hell? There are plenty of holes. I've been reporting many times that I see "two-dashes" quite often. This proves I'm not delusional. It looks like one of those "connect the dots" puzzles from children's books. Leave that alone, the data is completely missed. It could be generated with random numbers generator and would be same close to the truth. On top of that, there is 100kcal difference which is quite huge.
I realize optical HR sensors are not perfect and sometimes do things better, some other times worse but what I see here is just plain wrong. I know there are defenders here and Fitbit is deaf on the problem ( which I think is rather a hardware problem ). I know that it could be just my Ionic ( maybe it's broken? ) but so far I haven't seen single proof of accuracy and what I show here is evidence based on raw data obtained on two devices and perfectly synchronized by time stamps with 1-second accuracy.
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