Auto recognise exercise vs start it yourself

[Fraj1]

I had a HRInspire that was great at auto detecting swimming, walking, treadmill, bike etc but Versa4 does not seem as efficient at this. Should it be? When should I set it myself and when should I let it auto detect? Pros and cons of each approach? Thanks

[t.parker]

It depends on your individual usage patterns. I disable autodetection of everything to avoid mess in logs. Basically, I don't want to see several little walks or whatever would get detected. I'm very particular about what and when I track so do it always manually. Also autorecognition isn't perfect. Rarely works for me during swimming (tried it just a few times but it was hit and miss). It does work for walking but I don't track walking at all. I don't want my runs autodetected because I know when I start and stop my runs etc. One downside of autodetection is that it is detected once you are a few minutes in. I don't see downsides of manual tracking (unless you are forgetable and forget to start or stop tracking 🙂 ).

[CorneliuG]

This is an issue that Fitbit should address.

I agree with you that Versa 4 is very bad at recognizing exercise and this is mostly due to bad programming; it seems like Fitbit outsourced this to someone without experience and poor quality control.

Here is the summary of issues related to auto recognizing activity:

• First you bave to set a minimum period before recognizing and recording that activity. That is normal though I think the minimum time should be 5 minutes. With the current 10 minutes minimum,  If one is swimming for 9:30 minutes it will not be recorded as a swimming activity though it should 
• After detecting an activity don’t wait for me to confirm. This is what auto recognition should do.
• When activity is recognized, consider the starting time at the beginning (before the minimum period) since my walk for example started 10 min ago. Currently Versa 4 starts the activity when I press confirm.
• It’s not that complicated to detect when activity stopped. After 2 min since activity stopped, the activity mode should stop and activity should be saved. It would be nice if user can customize also the pause interval before auto stop per activity. I don’t want the watch to consider activity stopped just because I had to wait for a stop light to go green. When activity is stopped do not register the 2 min rest time as activity.
• Lastly let's talk about the watch displays during activity. Let’s not forget that this is first a watch so I want to see the time when I look at it. Now regarding activity info, the watch should display meaningful information for the activity for example I would like to see total duration and the number of steps if walking.

Lets hope that someone at Fitbit will address these issues.

[heatherysmith]

I've just got a versa 4 and completely agree with all of this - I used to have a versa 2 and set it to only count something as a walk if it were over 30 minutes. This worked well with the more basic functionality of the versa 2 but with the 4 tracking (quite randomly) after only a few minutes it makes my log look like a mess. I'm going to follow your advice and turn off auto-tracking until this feature is improved!

[Rich_Laue]

I took a walk last Saturday, first walk without enabling. I had returned, walked inside and up 4 flights of stairs. Sometime later, I noticed my watch has detected a walk and asking to confirm. 

What surprised me was seeing the GPS and it properly logged the stop time. 

I do agree that having a too short time will give many false possitives. As it stands, prepping a large store, like Target, for inventory has almost always been detected as a walk. My arms are not swinging at all.