Support the use of an external heart rate monitor

[Matt_Harrell]

I'm a fairly serious cyclist. I'd love to see my Pixel Watch 4 support the use of an external HR monitor (I use a Garmin chest strap monitor). As good as the HR monitor is on the PW4, it's still not going to be as good as one that directly measures the electrical signals that trigger a heart beat.

[haddat]

Totally agree. I used the Garmin HR chest belt too with my Garmin watch. I'm missing this feature with my Google Pixel Watch 4.

[BRogers80]

Yes, please. I always use a ecg chest strap when doing trainig sessions with high heart rate.

[slowerthanyou]

Google is definitely losing sales due the lack of external HRM support. Fitbit won't even acknowledge that a chest strap is far superior to an optical wrist-based heart rate monitor for many types of exercises. It's just stubborn.

[tmizster]

I couldn’t agree more. I have no idea why Google doesn’t just add support here. They’d pull in a ton of Garmin and serious fitness users if they did.

The new AI app is awesome, but not when it’s fed garbage HR data. I’ve been testing the PW4 and sometimes it’s great, but in many cases the HR is so far off I can’t use it. The other morning I did a short, easy warm-up run before a hill workout and my PW4 was showing a HR of 174, while my Garmin + HRM was correctly reading 128.

Then I have to read the Fitbit AI telling me all these things about my incorrect HR. "Great effort, you got out strong with a 174 heart rate!" Garbage in, garbage out.

That said, I do like the direction Google is going. If they added this one feature, they would have something powerful.

[slowerthanyou]

That's what I was afraid of. I ended up buying a Garmin 965 directly
because of the lack of HRM strap support. My wife is going to try the PW4
for running and indoor cycling, but I do not have high hopes given your
input.

[Matt_Harrell]

The accuracy of the PW4's HR monitor is likely going to depend on what activity you're doing.  I believe that DC Rainmaker and some other reputable reviewers have all said it's quite good for an optical wrist-based system.  I will say that I've had problems with two consecutive chest strap HR monitors in the last couple of weeks, and while I wait for a new one to arrive from a different brand, I've been broadcasting the HR from my PW4 on my trainer rides, and it's been doing great.  It's always been at least reasonably close to what the strap was showing (via the training app), sometimes with a slight delay.  Still, I REALLY want it to support external HR monitors.  When they're actually working, they'll always be the most accurate.

[tmizster]

My experience with the PW3 and PW4 is that they often fall into bad cadence lock on runs. It eventually corrects, but not before all of the HR metrics are whacked out (and sometimes it will jump back to crazy-high HR again later in the run). Like I mentioned in an earlier post, when you know the data is totally wrong, it has a ripple effect on everything else the Fitbit side is analyzing, e.g. VO2 max, recovery time, fitness level, etc..
I don't want a chill zone 2 run to be looked at as a high heart rate effort!

Apple Watch seems to do a better job here with optical HR, but both Apple and Garmin pair to external chest HRM straps, which is the way to go if you care about accurate heart-rate data.

Please, Google... add support for this.

[haddat]

Totally agree.
But I doubt that Google will do us the favor.

Unfortunately, that is not the only shortcoming of PW4 & Fitbit.