Low heart rate issue

[tomylee]

Hello,

I have a heart rate issue when I am resting and during the night. My heart rate goes under 40 bpm and I have checked this with other equipment. The lowest I have seen on the Ionic is 38bpm but often when I have a low HR I see values between 70-90. Sometimes in the morning in bed I look at the watch and it says I do have 85bpm and after I get up, walking around it says like 65bpm.

As you can see in the chart from last night sleep, I have values down to 40bpm and suddenly it jumps up to 78-90bpm. These high values I do have most of the time during my sleep, which is nonsense. Therefore detailed sleep analysis does not work because of no steady HR.

I do have a mitral insufficiency (which do have many people actually) and this relates to a heart rate with two top peaks, which seems stronger during low HR. The free app on my phone which uses the camera to measure the HR can handle this just fine, but the 300 bugs Ionic not so much.

It seems like that the algorithm used does not consider these circumstances.

Is there any improvement on the short term?

Thomas

[Baltoscott]

@tomylee -- Yeah, assuming that you are not awake most of the night, it kind of looks like the HR needs to be zeroed or something. A more typical HR graph while you are sleeping is flat blue somewhere around resting HR, with some peaks in yellow as you briefly wake up.  (Yours almost looks upside down). 

I think you should try restarting your Ionic.  You might also try tightening or loosening the band a notch or two to see if that makes any difference.

[tomylee]

@Baltoscott I have all of this already done but not really a change. Tonight it was a bit different but still many values which are way to high. To divide them by 2 would be the correct value.  

[Baltoscott]

@tomylee - not sure how to generate the graph you are posting but wondering what the rest of your day looks like in comparison.  Does it seem inaccurate just during sleep or all the time?

I wear my Ionic on the weekends and have not experienced the problem you are seeing. This one is from Saturday. 

[tomylee]

@Baltoscott You get a more detailed graph when you create a manual activity on your dashboard. Just choose the time you wish, like your time of sleep and you have an activity with your sleep HR graph in detail, not just the average.

I see this specially during the night and when I have a very low HR, mostly below 45bpm. Sometimes it works and sometimes not.

I have to check when I am walking. I am not sure at the moment if those values are OK.

This graph shows my day after getting up until now. Looks so far OK.

[Baltoscott]

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@tomylee wrote:

@Baltoscott You get a more detailed graph when you create a manual activity on your dashboard. Just choose the time you wish, like your time of sleep and you have an activity with your sleep HR graph in detail, not just the average.

...

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@tomylee -- thanks.  I had forgotten that trick. 

You probably know this, but when you create manual activities the stats associated with those activities (steps and distance if you enter a distance for the activity, calorie burn if you enter that) will overwrite whatever fitbit has calculated based on your tossing and turning through the night.  If you want to keep your other metrics clean, you should probably delete the manual activities after you create and save the detailed HR graphs.  Wish there were an easier way to extract HR data for time periods, but I expect that fitbit doesn't do it presently because it would make clear how often the HR sample rate is during periods of non-exercise (my guess is the sample rate is fairly low to preserve battery life, but I don't know).  

[tomylee]

@Baltoscott Thanks for that information. Right now I am not so much interested into kcal, rather than a correct HR and sleep tracking. If not I will return it. Just to much money for a non working piece.

Would be great if Fitbit could say something to this issue...

[Baltoscott]

@tomylee — contact Fitbit via the help link at the bottom of the page.  This forum is really more about users helping users.  You have a 1 year warranty and, at least as compared to my unit, your tracker does not seem to be getting good hr readings.  

[Colinm39]

@BaltoscottYou generate the graph shown by @tomylee through your Custom Activities.. I only use it for sleep because it averages the calories over the time period for your active hours and you lose active minutes.  If you need to analyses HR over daylight hours I create that and examine etc and then delete the manual activity.

If you create the Custom Activity on the PC, in my case "Ionic HR" you can then access that via the phone and Fitbit give you the calories of effort..  The PC version doesn't and you need to enter your own calories.

I get the occasional error trying to view through the PC, probably because over 8 hours there are about 12,000 plot points.. 

I'm using this method to establish the relationship between average sleep HR and RHR.. The redlione is my typicl RHR average

[Baltoscott]

Thanks @Colinm39.