Floors incorrect, why not linked to GPS.

[Hainda00]

My Versa sometimes trackes floors very incorrect: I go alpine hicking and really would like to see how many floors/height meter I'm doing each time.

I was last week hiking and i had around 330 floors, while tracking with GPS, and the GPS told me I had around 1000m (~3300feet) elevation gain.
Now I was this week hiking, and my GPS track tracked my the Fitbit app says I gained 1500m (~4900feet) of elevation, but my Versa tells me I did only 272 floors. That can not be correct.

I usually track with the mobile app and also as exercise on my watch, because sometimes I loose bluetooth connection, but if I track on the phone it still will get the heartbeat data once I synchronize watch and mobile phone, so the track tracked with the phone is then correct. Then it also corrects for the wrong distance if my watch guessed my distance covered different than what I really did. Why doesn't it also correct the floors?

I was really motivated aiming for the height per day badges, but it I do now a long trip and then it anyway does count wrong it is not very motivating. Is there a workaround, can it be implemented so the tracked GPS also will correct the floors tracked by the watch, or can I manually log floors/edit my exercise data?

[LZeeW]

Hello @Hainda00 and a warm welcome.  All Fitbits that track floors use a relative altimeter.  It counts a floor with a 10 ft (3.04 m) continuous rise in elevation.  If your section of the hike takes you up only 9 ft, then down a little bit, before continuing back up, you won't get credit for a floor. 

Like I said, the altimeter is a relative altimeter and is not connected to the GPS in any way.  Sorry.

[Rich_Laue]

Using GPS to count floor changes has a few problems. 

Gps would have to enabled all day. Do you mind charging the tracker and your phone several times a day? 

The versa does not have GPS it uses the phones GPS. 

Gps is not accurate when indoors. 

When moving gps to measure altitude is not very accurate and why gps for altitude can not be the prime source for pilots. Pilots measure altitude the same way your tracker does. 

Yes there are drawbacks, but technology does not have anything better. 

[Hainda00]

GPS watches are usually made to last for a 1 day tour, like 8h at least, and there are phones with normal battery life. Having to charge a phone on a daily basis is anyway ridiculous. So battery life is no argument for me, I have no problem for simple day tours to leave my GPS on all day. For the 1500m I also tracked for 10.5h without any problems.
And 270 floors for 1500m seems way more inaccurate. There must be something possible to improove this.
I got that fitbit requires to walk 10 feet in height in one go to register 1 floor, but does it then also take half floors or so. So if I walk 3x 9 ft it wonät count anz floor, but if i walk 16ft and then 14ft will it count 3 floors, 1.6 + 1.4.

On the activity details on the fitbit webpage I obtain a very good height profile. Is this obtained over the trackers air pressure sensor, or over the the GPS data mapped onto the height profile of the map. A fitbit is for tracking humans and not birds, ans humans are somehow ground bound. I see nothing wrong with using GPS data mapped onto map material to determine the current height.

If this can not be done then it should be possible to manually log floors. I mainly upgraded from my Alta HR to the Versa for the floor count because i'm hiking in the mountains a lot, but like this it doesn't seem very useful.

How is the Versa dealing with weather changes? I read it can also mess up the floor counts.
I know GPS has it limitations. But if I have the possibilty to use multiple sensors (barometer+GPS) then the data should be combined to obtain the best results and not one just completely ignored. Obviously I don't use GPS indoors for floors and distance but I take my GPS for running and hiking or cycling. I can link the Versa to my phones GPS, and as said before it corrects the distance, it should also correct the floors.

[Bleeh]

I agree, GPS tracking combined with relative altimeter tracking seems like a no-brainer.

My phone does perfectly fine tracking using GPS for a full day, so the battery drain argument doesn't make much sense. Perhaps FitBit's developers can figure out how to correlate up/down altimeter changes with periodic syncing with the phone's GPS to obtain usable records.

[Rich_Laue]

While on a bike ride, walk, hike, run and recording with gps, Fitbit will use the gps to determine changes in altitude. Your record on https://www.fitbit.com/activities will show this. 

Floors are more designed to keep track of how many stairs a person has climbed. These stairs are usually indoors where gps will not work. Since we are talking about the Versa, unlike the ionic, the versa does not have a built in gps. 

@Hainda00 Fitbit does not look at the weather or how windy it is. If it finds a sudden decrease in air pressure then a floor may be counted. If a wind blows a across the arm and the tracker is in a low pressure area then it might record a floor. 

I know of no personal phone or tracker that uses gps to determine altitude throughout the day. Aviation rules, because of unreliability prohibit gps for the main means of determining altitude. 

I agree @Bleeh that would be called calibration but quick changes in air pressure will not stop erroneous floors from being counted. 

[Hainda00]

Yes, but then there should be an option to correct manually for the errors at least, or at the end of the day, it doesn't have to be live. I anyway also often am in areas with no or weak mobile signal, so internet for map updates for the GPS is not even possible. But that is the great thing about a GPS that it can collect data everywhere once it finds the satellites. 

Fitbits are activity trackers, so one goal is to compare activities, see if I have progress/consistency over months of training or so. I have diagrams for cal burned per day, steps per day, active minutes per day, and also floors per day. But if the floors are wrong, whats the point about implementing it at all.

The elevation profile on https://www.fitbit.com/activities is great, but there is no option that I can look at how much elevation I did on each day for the last 30 days over the elevation profiles, there is only the option to show floors, floors per day, floors per month, lifetime floors. And my floors were wrong by 40%. So for the rainbow badge I would need to walk then 12000 feet per day instead of 7000? Thats a bit of a unrealistic goal.