Spurious heart rate while wearing drysuit

I was out diving today and during the surface interval between dives I noticed that my Descent Mk2 was showing a heart rate even though I was wearing it over a drysuit. It displayed random readings in the 50 - 90 bpm range. Obviously the LED wrist sensor can't detect a real heart rate through a drysuit, and I wasn't wearing a chest strap heart monitor. I suppose I can just manually disable the wrist heart rate sensor when I put on my drysuit but Garmin might want to improve their algorithm in this situation.

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9576619 over 4 years ago +2

I have the same problem with a my Mk2i while wearing a 7mm wet suite. For some intervals during the dive in "recorded" heart rates between 70 and 90. I would be very surprised if the LED would work through…

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0 atj777 over 4 years ago

That is odd. I don't have an Mk2 but with my Mk1 as soon as it is not on my bare wrist it just displays --- for the heart rate. When I look at the heart rate history in Garmin Connect there are gaps for the time it wasn't on my bare wrist.

0 9576619 over 4 years ago

I have the same problem with a my Mk2i while wearing a 7mm wet suite. For some intervals during the dive in "recorded" heart rates between 70 and 90. I would be very surprised if the LED would work through 7mm neoprene.

0 Jason_Morgan over 3 years ago

I've noticed this and my guess is that is uses movement accelerometer data combined with prior heartrate data to predict a likely heartrate given the effort it estimates. A means to fill in the gaps in real data.