Sense swim tracking pool on open water

[linzena]

Hi All, I've recently experienced a problem with swim tracking on my sense (which I've been using for 18 months with no issues). I went for a swim in my gym's open water pool last week (again being doing this for at least 18 months). Set pool length and at the end of swim, all seemed ok on my Fitbit - correct lengths etc - but when I synced with the app, it lost the lengths, and showed gps tracking meaning it thought it had taken me 35 mins to swim 78m (pool in question is 20m)?!? Not happened before and swim on Thurs (inside in different pool) was fine. Anyone else experienced this or know what's going on?

Thanks in advance fellow fitbitters!

Moderator edit: Subject for clarity.

[GraceGFitbit]

Welcome to the Fitbit Community @linzena. Thank you for letting us know about this inconvenience.

There are several ways to record your activities including: Workout mode on your Sense, SmartTrack, MobileRun and manual recording. Have you checked the SmartTrack auto-recognition setting on the app? The SmartTrack function automatically detects activities involving a large number of continuous movements such as Swimming. However, using two ways of recording an activity at the same time is not recommended as it may cause some information to be missing.

With the exercise app you can capture real-time stats, including heart rate data, calories burned, time elapsed, and route traveled. To learn more about it you can check How do I track my workouts with my Fitbit device?

Disable the automatic recognition choice on the application. SmartTrack recognizes exercises that last more than 15 or 10 minutes depending on the settings. This feature may activate at the same time as the exercise application so, I therefore recommend that you disable automatic recognition.

I hope this information will be useful to you.

Best regards !

[linzena]

Quite frankly, I find this response mildly insulting. I've been swimming with a fitbit for 5 years, first with an ionic and, for the last 18 months, with my sense - I know how to track and I always start a swim manually as smart track is hugely unreliable for swims.

For clarity, I checked the pool length was set correctly then manually started and stopped the activity. The data on the Sense at the end of the swim showed correctly as 50 lengths, however, once it synced with the app, it showed incorrectly as only covering 78m based on GPS data. This would suggest that the issue is with the app not the device.

[t.parker]

@linzena swimming does not use GPS. There is no open water support with GPS on any Fitbit device.

[GraceGFitbit]

Thank you for getting back to us @linzena, and thank you for your comments @t.parker.

I confirm swimming does not use GPS. 

GPS signal reflections from the water impact the location accuracy. Also, GPS signal will be lost every time the watch is underwater as the signal does not travel under the surface of the water.

Hope this information gets you back on track.

[linzena]

Hi both, thanks for getting back to me.

I didn't think swim had a GPS open water option otherwise I would have been using it deliberately! However, the reason I though that was what happened is because, in the app, it's showing a Google map with start and end points (as it does for walks/runs when using GPS) although still showing lengths swum on that tab.

Anyway, it hasn't happened since, I wil keep you posted if it happens again.

Thanks for your comments.

[linzena]

After a couple of months of behaving itself, the GPS has once again kicked in! The lengths data is correct ( 30 x 20m) but is displaying a total distance of 70m (since no movement is shown on the google map presumably).  I know that it's not supposed to happen but see that this has cropped up before and is mentioned in other threads, for example with the ionic.

Is it something I should contact support about so they can investigate?

Thanks

[steverod]

I would love to hear about this, as it just happened to me as well. To be clear:

1. Use “swim” mode in Exercise app to track my swimming. 
2. finish swimming, see exercise. Nice! I did well! The number of lengths is correct, the distance is (more or less) correct, at 1230 yards. Sync to app, see this info on my dashboard. Feel proud. 
3. some short time later, the reported exercise (in the app) now has a GPS map(?!) and a distance of 101 yards but still 45 lengths.  I know I am slow but not THAT slow.  

This seems like a bug, especially since it HAD been correct??

[t.parker]

@steverod it seems like a bug which occurs incredibly rarely. It reminds me old bug in Swim activity when it added HR to auto-recognized swimming (HR should be disabled but it wasn't). In here, GPS map seems to be unintentionally added as well. I'm going to do more open water swimming soon and I'm curious whether it will happen 🤔 Officially, no Fitbit supports OWS (and that doesn't look like any kind of support for OWS as things like lengths are irrelevant in OWS).