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Apple says the Watch's irregular heart rate tracking is intentional
- Thread starter Tiks90
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The most accurate way to track your HR while physical activity is a chest strap or taking your pulse on your neck or wrist for 10 seconds multiplied by 6. The watch can do it for you if you manually do it and log it. You guys talk about being active and use it for fitness but are too lazy to manually log it? Burn a few calories by lifting up your arm and manually take your HR. Sheesh!
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To tell you the truth, optical HR monitor is not the best. Monitors that use electrical contact points are more ideal even when doing physical activity.
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To tell you the truth, optical HR monitor is not the best. Monitors that use electrical contact points are more ideal even when doing physical activity.
The actually makes a lot of sense... Resting heart rate is more important than heart rate while you're walking down the street. I would be more interested to see how my resting heart rate changes throughout the day. You still get you heart rate when you workout and you can always manually check it. Battery saving or not I think this is pretty smart by apple.
I think that most folks know that chest straps or manual HR measurements are the most accurate, especially the athletes. But, these threads are revealing that fitness tracker customers want a device that gives them regular HR readings. And based on the comments, it looks like those users can live with some inaccuracy. Additionally, there are other threads where AW users are reporting that the watch measures very closely to their chest straps during exercise, so maybe AW is using a good sensor. I plan to run with my AW to compare it to my Garmin. I am very curious.
I'm not sure how connected the HRM and the move tracking are but ironically I woke up to a new award this morning for the most active day yesterday since I got the watch. I was sitting in a car for seven hours! Maybe what apple is telling me is that I need to sit around more #
Just reading through everything on this and people's observations it doesn't seem to quite add up. Initially Apple says there isn't a problem, then that say it is a new feature (even though it wasn't mentioned in the release notes) and then it seems that even though this new feature has been implemented some of the 'connected' features that may have relied on 10 minute HR readings have not been updated as well.
Did not think apple did this kind of thing. I have always found them to be a straight shooting company and I think Tim Cook is trying to establish a reputation as an honest, principled guy. How they are handling this, regardless of whether it is that big a deal, appears counter to this key cultural value to me. I've been an apple fan for a long time now, but it seems to be changing for the worse to me and I'm concerned we may have seen its best days. I don't want to believe this, but my gut tells me this is so.
Just reading through everything on this and people's observations it doesn't seem to quite add up. Initially Apple says there isn't a problem, then that say it is a new feature (even though it wasn't mentioned in the release notes) and then it seems that even though this new feature has been implemented some of the 'connected' features that may have relied on 10 minute HR readings have not been updated as well.
Did not think apple did this kind of thing. I have always found them to be a straight shooting company and I think Tim Cook is trying to establish a reputation as an honest, principled guy. How they are handling this, regardless of whether it is that big a deal, appears counter to this key cultural value to me. I've been an apple fan for a long time now, but it seems to be changing for the worse to me and I'm concerned we may have seen its best days. I don't want to believe this, but my gut tells me this is so.
Apple says the Watch's irregular heart rate tracking is intentional
It really depends what your looking for. For people who may have high BP or an arrythmia, monitoring resting HR is top priority. People who use it for fitness use it to reach or stay within target HR to get optimum affectiveness of their workout.
It really depends what your looking for. For people who may have high BP or an arrythmia, monitoring resting HR is top priority. People who use it for fitness use it to reach or stay within target HR to get optimum affectiveness of their workout.
Timeline:
5/19: Apple released the update. The release notes did not mention a change in the HR reading methodology.
5/20: The 1.0.1 HR threads started on this forum.
5/21-22: Other forums and tech blogs picked up on the issue.
5/28-29: Apple revised its support pages to reflect the new HR measurement methodology
~5/29: Other larger media blogs started citing the issue.
Apple's principal response has been to revise its support pages to formally claim the new approach as intended behavior. However, the noise started slowly and is building. I bet Apple is either hoping it blows over or they will respond again in the next week or two.
5/19: Apple released the update. The release notes did not mention a change in the HR reading methodology.
5/20: The 1.0.1 HR threads started on this forum.
5/21-22: Other forums and tech blogs picked up on the issue.
5/28-29: Apple revised its support pages to reflect the new HR measurement methodology
~5/29: Other larger media blogs started citing the issue.
Apple's principal response has been to revise its support pages to formally claim the new approach as intended behavior. However, the noise started slowly and is building. I bet Apple is either hoping it blows over or they will respond again in the next week or two.
One more thing: Resting Heart Rate ≠ HR when Arm Not Moving
This change does nothing to improve a resting HR measurement. The watch was already capturing a resting HR just fine. It is causing the watch to ignore a lot of readings throughout the day that people might find informative.
This change does nothing to improve a resting HR measurement. The watch was already capturing a resting HR just fine. It is causing the watch to ignore a lot of readings throughout the day that people might find informative.
That's because there isn't a resting heart rate measurement .. At least I can't find one either in the iOS Health app or the Watch/iPhone Activity apps. Other activity trackers at least use an algorithm to calculate resting HR, but not Apple as I can see. So even though Apple now only captures your heart rate at rest, it doesn't present you with a daily resting heart rate. All we have are the readings in the Health app.
At least have an option to have it measure your heart rate every 10 minutes, and if they're so concerned about battery, put a warning in the settings app.
Continuous heart rate monitoring never made sense to me from a fitness tracking perspective so having that go away with the watch update doesn't seem like a problem. Heart rate monitors were designed to measure effort during steady state aerobic exercise. Equations that estimate calorie burn using heart rate are based on certain assumptions that just don't apply to other types of activity. So if people are concerned that not having readings every ten minutes means your calorie burn is off, well, HR wasn't going to give accurate results outside of a cardio workout situation anyway. I suspect Apple is relying on other estimators for basic daily movement (they should be if they aren't), and only relies on heart rate when you log a workout.
I do realize there are other valid reasons to want to monitor your heart rate, so giving people the option to log HR data regularly outside of a workout would be a nice option. Just wanted to say that it doesn't matter all that much for calorie burn in non-cardio-workout situations.
I do realize there are other valid reasons to want to monitor your heart rate, so giving people the option to log HR data regularly outside of a workout would be a nice option. Just wanted to say that it doesn't matter all that much for calorie burn in non-cardio-workout situations.
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Disagree .. So do Fitbit, Basis, and Microsoft. All use continuous HR monitoring to better gauge activity. If the HR sensor is present in the watch, then why not utilize it.
It's false advertising... it was sold as checking your heart rate every 10 minutes... now it only does so when you're not moving? so this fancy "activity" tracker can't actually track activity but only "inactivity" hmmm.... someone dropped the ball over there.
Yeah, I figured people would disagree. Again, my comment was that if you want continuous HRM for calorie burn estimation, be aware of the inherent limitations on accuracy. Heart rate can go up for a variety of reasons and the corresponding effect on energy expenditure also varies. Those who are interested can google HRM and weight lifting for a variety of articles on how HRMs do (or don't) work for estimating calorie burn during strength training, as an example. or check out these blog posts (not first person research but nice summaries of the factors involved)
http://www.sparkpeople.com/blog/blo...s_my_heart_rate_monitor_for_strength_training
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Az...count-calories-during-strength-training-17698
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Not very well... I work outdoors... the last friday and saturday we've had great weather so I'm walking around my work area racking up over 15km walking (according to health app)... exercise ring for those 2 days didn't go over 10 min each day (only ⅓ full).
Today was raining all day so I mostly stayed stationary under my canopy and only walked 6km... My exercise ring today wrapped around itself twice hitting 1hr9min of activity.
This is because today I didn't move much so I saw more regular heart rate readings however there is NO WAY I burned more calories today sitting around then I did the last two days. So in my opinion the fact that it ignores the automatic reading whenever I'm moving shows that it's not a very good activity tracker and in fact it was giving me credit for NOT MOVING. Following this logic those "activity rings" actually promote INACTIVITY.
It sucks, so you can choose to use an app that will track exercise stats and GPS data, or use the built in workout app to get accurate heart data - but you can't get both? What a $400 piece of crap. I'm getting awfully tired of the compromises this watch continually presents as a fitness tracker.
Well, you aren't going to get many heart rate readings during strength training anyway with a wrist based optical HRM. I really don't care to track my HR while lifting weights anyway. I was more referring to aerobic exercise and the value of recording HR and steps to calculate calorie burn.
Think hiking up a steep mountain trail, you will certainly burn many more calories than walking around a flat track .. but step count could very possibly be the same. So if you only used steps to calc calories they would be equal when that obviously isn't the case, since you likely had a elevated HR during the hike.
I don't consider these activities structured workouts, so no, I wouldn't use the AW workout app as I would with my structured runs and rides.
It is sort of moot anyway since Apple materially changed the functionality of the HRM in a significant way from what was documented in the original support docs describing the HRM. They also did it in sort of sneaky way (hastily changing the doc in the wee hours of Saturday morning) which has rightly upset many of their customers. That's the real issue.
If people wanted to take their own pulse and log it themselves what the hell do you think they bought a watch for?
In one of the online reports I read on this subject Apple was saying that they did this to improve the HR reporting. I believe that more than battery life, which will be improved by this change, is the fact that Apple was seeing a lot of reports of people complaining that the system was wrong because they were seeing wildly varying numbers for their HR. Invariably others would ask if they were possibly moving around at the time when the increased HR was recorded. Apple does not take lightly reports of their equipment not being accurate when the cause is people not using it correctly or not interpreting correctly. I see this as their way of ensuring that the HR is only measured when the 
Watch owner is sitting or resting thereby insuring that "erroneous" readings do not occur.
I do wish, if this is the case, that would have set it up so we had a choice: take the HR every 10 minutes or when sitting.
Watch owner is sitting or resting thereby insuring that "erroneous" readings do not occur.I do wish, if this is the case, that
would have set it up so we had a choice: take the HR every 10 minutes or when sitting.In one of the online reports I read on this subject Apple was saying that they did this to improve the HR reporting. I believe that more than battery life, which will be improved by this change, is the fact that Apple was seeing a lot of reports of people complaining that the system was wrong because they were seeing wildly varying numbers for their HR. Invariably others would ask if they were possibly moving around at the time when the increased HR was recorded. Apple does not take lightly reports of their equipment not being accurate when the cause is people not using it correctly or not interpreting correctly. I see this as their way of ensuring that the HR is only measured when the
I do wish, if this is the case, that
There wouldn't be an issue if Apple didn't change the functioning of the HRM from what was described in their original support document:
"The heart rate sensor can also use infrared light. This mode is what Apple Watch uses when it measures your heart rate every 10 minutes. However, if the infrared system isn’t providing an adequate reading, Apple Watch switches to the green LEDs. In addition, the heart rate sensor is designed to compensate for low signal levels by increasing both LED brightness and sampling rate."
I agree the IR sensor doesn't read well while you are in motion, maybe they should just use the green LEDs to get the passive readings every 10 minutes. I doubt the battery life impact would be appreciable and the LEDs are obvious more effective at getting a reading in all conditions.
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