[REQUEST] : Open water swim app

The problem is that while swimming, GPS would keep losing signals as your arm goes in the water, and a ton of work would probably be needed for the GPS to make sense..

Yes I get the GPS issue. I guess what I'm asking is anyone planning or prepared to develop an app that mimics the same functionality for open water that is available for the Fenix watches.

Ie. Takes the multiple gps spots and smooths or generalises the direction and adds in arm cadence ..etc.

Developers....

I've just done a open water sea swim using the Walk std app as a test for the watches GPS accuracy in water.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/758627728

It appears to track relatively well but clearly doesn't have the associated calorie, strike count ...etc metrics for swimming.

Is anyone prepared to develop a basic outdoor swimming app based on the Walk std app but with some generic swimming metrics for calories and maybe stroke count, calculated ave stroke length, etc.

The ConnectIQ framework doesn't allow inserting data into the activity file (the .fit file) that is recorded. An application could theoretically calculate the metrics that you want and display a fancy smoothed swim path, but they couldn't be put into the file, so they wouldn't be uploaded to Garmin Connect. Once they were uploaded, Garmin Connect would either not display them at all or would calculate them with possibly different results. I doubt that people would be very happy about that.

I created a simple activity app (Activity Recorder) that allows you to specify the activity type and which sensors you want to have enabled (including GPS). You might try that app to see how much of what you want is there already. I know it currently doesn't support swim specific data fields, but I could add those pretty easily. I could also tweak that app and make a one-off outdoor swim app, but it would still be limited by the issues mentioned above.

Travis

Thanks for this app Travis. I downloaded it and repeated the swim with your app...

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/760304293

As you can see it's less smooth....are Garmin doing something clever with their app wrt smoothing out irregular GPS ?

How are you calculating Calories? 1100 for a 39 minute swim albeit open water seems quite a lot.

I do love the app by the way. Loads of potential.

ConnectIQ apps don't have a great deal of control over what is recorded in the .fit file. I don't do any calculation and I don't have any way to smooth out GPS data either. All I do is start up the sensors the user requested and start a recording session when the user presses the start button. The framework and the underlying device software do the rest.

Travis

Brian, Brandon, Ken, Kyle, et al. Is there a reason that the positioning data recorded in a swimming activity type is so crazy compared to the data recorded while swimming and using the walking activity type? Could this be considered a ConnectIQ bug?

Travis

I think I would consider open water swim filtering being applied to an activity recorded in walk mode to be a device bug.

Using the built in swim filtering for a ConnectIQ app is a feature that is not exposed at this time. Lap swimming features are also not available. I've created a ticket to request this feature. This could either be exposed via an option when creating a session, or automatically applied to the swimming sport/subsport pairs.

I'm not sure it is a bug for the walk mode data to be filtered to as it is. I do think it would be a valuable enhancement if whatever filtering is being applied to recording a walk activity now was applied when recording in swim a swim activity.

After looking around in the VivoActive settings some more, I think Ian's recording in post #4 has to be the result of intermittent GPS reception. It does not appear the open water swimming feature found on our multisport devices is available on VivoActive at all. The swim mode appears to only support pool swimming. If the swimming modes are made available to ConnectIQ I suspect only the modes available in the native device modes would be accessible on each device..