When do steps not get counted?

[econklin]

There are circumstances when my Charge 2 ignores steps. Some of these include:

      * when I'm walking around my small kitchen: I can spend 20 minutes preparing food, emptying the dishwasher, and doing other chores without a single step being counted. The kitchen is about 15 steps long.

     * grocery shopping: there's something about pushing a grocery cart that makes it ignore steps.

I get that it's looking for arm swings, but if I consciously try to swing the Fitbit arm (non-dominent) it doesn't help in the kitchen, although it does with the grocery cart. But there are other circumstances when I can't swing the arm (e.g., carrying something) when it counts fine. Can you describe the algorithm a little more clearly?

[JohnnyRow · Accepted solution]

About the grocery cart, wrist-worn trackers can only detect steps from normal swinging of arms while walking.  So when wrist is supported still on shopping cart, or baby carriage or treadmill hand rail, it sees no motion and cannot tell what hips and legs are doing so it generally will not detect steps, unless you are lucky enough to find a cart that goes straight that you can push with one arm.

However by putting tracker in pocket or somehow pinned to clothing, you will generally get good step count, at the expense of losing heart rate data during that time.

As for your kitchen, if you are carrying something, the same logic might apply. Otherwise, and I'm not sure of this part, but it might require 10 steps to start counting, to help prevent false step counting from other arm movements.  But the 10 steps would still be counted eventually; i.e. the step count would start at 11 so the 1st ten would not be lost.