Wrong distance tracking

[Petra_d]

Within the pas 2 days, I used Fitbit to track my activity and both times the distance tracked was wrong, approxiimately half of the actual distance. First day, Fitbit said that I ran 5,4 km while the actualy distance was approx. 12 km. The next day, I decided to use also Runkeeper to track the run. Runkeeper recorded 25 km, which was in line with what also my boyfriend recorded using his Garmin watch, while Fitbit said the overall distance was only 11.18... (I used GPS in my phone to support Fitbit for both the activities and I have the latest version of the firmware installed). The journey map recorded by Fitbit is complete an copies the one recorded by Runkeeper, only the distance is wrong...

Do you please have any idea what might cause this? I really like the Fitbit watch, but this is annoying, since it impacts all the statistics and makes the watch use-less for activity tracking...

[dirkprimbs]

It's getting worse. The past 2 runs are now downs twice in my activity tracker, one with the correct distance, the other with the wrong one. I suspect that the backend shows the reading of my charge 2 and the phone side by side. 

As a result I now start mistrusting pretty much everything the dashboard tells me since I don't know how it really counts anything. I'm very close to give up on this device as it apparently does not track activity properly and I also don't get the impression anyone at Fitbit actually cares.

//D

[Wobblyheed]

What are fitbit doing about this? It's obvious there was a problem with the software update.....

[MarjanG]

Dear @LanuzaFitbit

You still have no news? 

I deal with the same problem,

I'm thinking of returning my Charge 2 because the essence is completely lost. 

Which is very sad because before this problem I was always satisfied.

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hello everyone.

Unfortunately there isn't anything new to bring up. 

I do have a question I'd like to ask all of you. Did you pause the bike activity on the tracker or not at all?

Look forward to your replies.

[AllanHvass]

No manual pauses done by me, neither when tracking on bike or by running.

Given how broadly this is reported now across the forum, I don't think this issue can be hard to reproduce on the developer side. I do assume that most people working at Fitbit uses a device themselves also and must have hit the issue personally. So repros should be available easily.

[MelleKing]

What I noticed is that in the cases the tracking was wrong, the phone was
initially not found by the charge 2.
After some running or walking the charge 2 has found the phone shown by the
icon. Even during the run or walk it is clear miles instead of KM are
tracked although charge 2 shows as km.

[Hiccups47]

I've not paused the bike setting or played with any of the settings in fact. And the problem happens with the running setting as well. Since the problem started, I've noticed that when I start recording an activity, the watch vibrates a few seconds after I've started, and the screen says "Ready". I can no longer see my time or steps etc on the screen during the exercise as it stays on "Ready" the whole time. It's recording "something" in the background but not the right data. Plus, over a 5km run, which it records as approx 3km, the timings are different for each "km". By this, I mean that I run at a steady pace. So each km should be similar in distance and time to another. But my fitbit might tell me that the 1st "km" was 6 mins, the 2nd was 11 mins and the 3rd was 9 mins. And the GPS map shows each "km" as being different distances to each other . The km markers on the map are erratically spaced and not consistent distances. Everything about the fitbit is wrong!! I can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet. I want to return mine for a refund.

[drc79]

I'm seeing this issue too. This evening Fitbit Charge 2 reported I'd run 2.2 miles using Connected GPS. The mapped route was more or less correct Having checked with Google maps, it was more like 3 miles. All my recent runs seem suspect too. What is the point of a Fitness Tracker that can't do the basics?

[MelleKing]

Your experience of the charge 2 vibrating means at first it did not see
sync with the phone where GPS is. After that it did find it as it says
ready.
I only experience wrong distance tracking in that scenario.
That is, when immediately stop tracking at the start and start over, and
the fitbit does find the phone in one go the distance tracking is fine.

Fitbit should fix the case when the phone and fitbit only find each other a
little after tracking started when that READY is displayed!

[Wobblyheed]

No pauses from me while walking...

Last night logged 4.05 miles - map My Walk was 5 miles. I know which one was correct.

I have also noticed the "Ready" message when starting the walk activity. I will try and restart the activity tonight to see if it makes any difference,

[Raindeer]

Same problem here. Fitbit Charge 2. Use an LG G4 phone and Runtastic as my running app. Until December this all worked flawlessly together. So much so I intended to drop Runtastic. And then it stopped. The route is still recorded quite well, though with some oddities, such as showing me running back and forward over the same route for like 100m. When I run passed a canal, it may show me jumping from one side of the canal to the other and back (50m jump, I intend to participate in the Olympics)

Now I collected my last few runs in a excel and did some calculations. You can see the cosistency of the stepcount and the runtastic distance, but both Fitbit distance and step per K are completely out of whack. Now I went with the Charge2 for its GPS feature and to measure heartrate while running. Currently it is useless in this capacity. 

Runtastic distance	Fitbit Distance	Fitbit Steps	Ratio Runtastic/Fitbit	steps per K Runtastic	Steps per K Fitbit
5,05	2,25	5023	2,244444444	994,6534653	2232,444444
4,57	2,66	4931	1,718045113	1078,993435	1853,759398
6,7	3,38	7338	1,982248521	1095,223881	2171,005917
5,02	3,22	5459	1,559006211	1087,450199	1695,341615
5,59	4,14	5478	1,350241546	979,9642218	1323,188406

[kristaov]

Just another +1

Same issue, distance is about 30% off, I also get the "check the app" and "ready" notifications when I start the connected GPS run activity. (today I did a 7.5 K run, it logged as 4.88 K)

It started after the last app update some weeks ago.

[Grinden]

I have also had this problem for the last few days, most notably when I went on a 10k run today which the Fitbit tracked as 3.2k. The full route appeared on the map view though, so I exported the TCX and had a look at it. For every single reading (which seems to be once about every 1-4 seconds) there is a Lat/Long value and a current distance. It seems to be the distance that is incorrect, but the Lat/Long looks good which is why the route is correct on the map. So, I wrote a simple utility to recalculate the distance based on the difference between the Lat/Long coordinates at each point. Interestingly, for my 10k run, this came out at about 12.5k, so it makes sense that they would be applying some kind of filter to smooth the data and avoid any inaccurate readings giving excess distance readings. My guess is that they've broken this filter somehow.

It seems to me that a developer at Fitbit should be able to take one of these TCX files with an invalid distance measurement and reasonably easily use that to understand why the distance is being calculated incorrectly. The only thing that they might also need is the GPS reading accuracy which the TCX format doesn't support, but maybe they store that in the Fitbit internal database.

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hey everyone.

Thanks for replying to my question! 

I'll pass this on to the rest of the team. Whenever I have any updates on the matter I'll be sure to let everyone know! 

Thanks for your patience and your understanding.

[MelleKing]

Fitbit app 2.67

This time after my run no map displayed. When does that happen? Not enough gps measurements or had the map been switched off? Strange. 

Still shows a distance tracked but that one is unfortunately off by about 25%

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hey @MelleKing.

That is the latest version available for today, thanks for letting me know. 

It is possible that the GPS connection failed for some reason. Were there a lot of trees or buildings where you took your run? Or maybe bad cell reception or even a very cloudy sky? Those could impact the GPS' performance since the data is coming from your phone and not from your Fitbit.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[Wobblyheed]

Downloaded a new update yesterday and it looks like the problem is fixed. Well it is on my Charge 2 anyway.

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hey @Wobblyheed! 

Glad to know that the update did resolve the issue for you! 

If you have the time, perhaps you could visit one of our Discussion boards. Lots of different topics to talk about in there.

Hope to see you around.

[Hiccups47]

How can I get the recent update on my fitbit? I've tried following online
instructions to do it via the app, but when I go into the section of the
app where I'm meant to find a link to updates, there is no mention of
updates on the page.

[Wobblyheed]

Google Play store. The updates appear in there for Android phones.