Versa 2: Juggling activity tracking steps

[Versa2user000]

I started juggling a few days ago and my watch has been registering my arm movements as steps. Today, for example, 5000 steps were added to my daily total after I juggled for about an hour. Is there a setting that can prevent this problem?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[RicardoFitbit]

Hi @Versa2user000, welcome to the Community Forums.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Fitbit devices have a finely-tuned algorithm for step counting. The algorithm is designed to look for intensity and motion patterns that are most indicative of people walking and running. When working at a desk, cooking, or performing other activities with arm movements, a device on your wrist may add some steps. When you’re doing activities that involve arm movement —such as juggling— you often walk a few steps in-between stationary periods as well, so the device tries to give you credit for those steps.

For most users, the number of extra steps added by arm-based movement isn’t significant when compared to your overall stats. For more information, see How does my Fitbit device calculate my daily activity?. Also, If you want to remove the steps from your daily total, manually log the driving activity for the time you were juggling. For more information, see How do I add, edit, or delete Fitbit data and activities?

Let me know if you have any additional questions.

[cilynx]

I've recently taken up juggling and am running into this problem as well.  When juggling, my Fitbit adds a step for every catch/toss cycle, even if I'm sitting down.  I understand that from a customer experience perspective I can take off the Fitbit or log a driving activity to counteract the steps, but from the ML/pattern matching engineering side, is there anything we can do to help?  It would be absolutely outstanding if the app would let you select a period of time and label it with a novel activity like juggling (sitting) or juggling (walking) so your engineering team can better train the algorithm.  It seems like you're most of the way there with the driving activity that stops step counting -- tweaking that to be a general unknown activity and giving the customer the option of sharing that specific data to help train the algorithm would be awesome.