Need help with a heart rate alarms app

Hi there,

I've recently bought Forerunner 745 and got disappointed by the fact that there is a "bad" irregular hear rate alarm feature. Actually, it allows to set a top level starting from 100 bpm only however I really need to set it from 80 (kindly don't ask why).

So now I'm looking for any way / hack to get what I want. I've deployed the Garmin development environment and now trying to create my own app to achive this.

I've already sorted out how to recieve the current heart rate and vibrate the watch if it is greater than 80 bpm. It works fine in the emulator but I don't know how to get it working on the watches in spite of my app is copied to the watches.

In a nutshell, I need a simple background app which monitors my heart rate and start vibrating when it gets > 80 in 24/7.

Can you please give me some architecture ideas how to do it: what kind of app it should be, which methods to use? P.S. I don't need a special watch face, only background mode all the time.

  • The problem with a background service doing this is that it can run at most once every 5 minutes, and for at most, 30 seconds at a time. Wrist heart rate has two modes - 24/7 and activity mode, where activity mode is more accurate, but burns more battery,

    So you can do a device app, that uses the higher precision WHR in the main app, meaning your app runs all the time.  Or you can do a watch face that displays the HR, but the only notifcation would be a message on the screen without a vibration or times and lower accuracy.

  • Is a device app - an activitiy? Will it be listed in among cycling, running and others?

  • Yes.  It will show in the activity loop On CIQ 4 devices if it has a glance view, it will also show in the glance loop. The 745 is a CIQ 3 device.

  • I ran a custom created activity with HR alarm @80 bpm last night :) It works but ate 60% of the battery within ~6 hours and the sleep tracker has not worked of course. So, it looks to be the same and it is not good solution meanwhile Disappointed

    What do you think about type="widget"? It works fine in the Emulator but does nothing on the watches: I can see it in the wdigets list but cannot open it (nothing happens when I press Start button)

  • on watches, a widget will timeout and close in 2 minutes or less.

  • It is very sad and annoying that there is no applicable solution for such an easy propouse. I would like to find out a default place where selected irregular HR max value is stored and replace it over there :) But no idea where to find. Got through all non-binary files under GARMIN/ folder but no success.

  • In my f6p I have alert out of activity maybe it will be useful.

  • I have such alert either but it triggers from 100 bpm only.

  • Maybe solution is writing app that sending HR to companion phone app, I'm not sure if it possible

    - watch face that reading HR live and sending it to phone app

    - app/wf with background (no battery draining)

    -- run every 5 minutes

    --reading HR history from last 5 minutes and sending  max/min to phone

    App on phone notify about bad values.

    But of course the simplest is modification ranges in watch by Garmin.

  • the problem with this is that even if it works you'll miss the event in average by 2.5 minutes