All day respiration rate?

I'm curious about this too, I have no idea what it's useful for, I suppose I'll figure that out after I've been using it for a while. Maybe it's useful for figuring out your stress levels, or maybe it's useful during sleep tracking? No idea.

Ya there's no hydration widget yet, though I'd expect it'll arrive soon. You can do hydration tracking in the Connect phone app, just not from the watch itself yet.

Respiration Tracking

See how you’re breathing throughout the day, during sleep and during breathwork and yoga activities.

If anyone is curious, I did some digging to try and figure out how the heck a wrist watch can measure your breathing rate, and while I can't be 100% that this is how the Fenix does it, it seems like the most likely method - measuring what's called "modulation of cardiac activity". Measuring this by using an optical sensor is very new, and basically still in the experimental stage. Not a lot of research has been done about its effectiveness during exercise, but it's apparently fairly accurate during rest, at least.

Here's a whitepaper about many types of respiratory measuring techniques - the section about measuring the modulation of cardiac activity starts on Page 30. https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/sensors/sensors-19-00908/article_deploy/sensors-19-00908.pdf

Here's some key points from the whitepaper:

The breathing activity modulates the PPG signal in three different ways: (i) amplitude
modulation caused by reduced blood stroke volume during the inspiratory phase (resulting by
changes in intrathoracic pressure) [247]; (ii) frequency modulation caused by spontaneous increase
of heart rate during inspiration phase and related decrease during expiration phase (as in the ECG
modulation) [238]; (iii) wander from the signal baseline caused by changes in tissue blood volume
(related to intrathoracic pressure changes carried within the arterial tree and vasoconstriction of arteries
during inhalation) [248]. Additionally, the respiratory activity affects the PPG pulse wave width [249].
During the inspiratory phase, sympathetic activation stiffens arteries, increasing pulse wave velocity
when compared to the expiratory phase. Moreover, intrathoracic pressure changes induced by the
respiratory activity can contribute to these stiffness variations [249].

Undoubtedly, there is a growing interest in the use of ECG and PPG signals for the continuous
measurement of fR. One of the main reasons is that electrodes for ECG and optical probes for PPG
sensors are already used in clinical practice and for home monitoring of heart activity and of oxygen
saturation. On the one hand, these sensors are good candidates for continuous fR monitoring since they
are characterized by low invasiveness, good integration in wearable systems, low energy consumption,
and low cost. On the other hand, their high sensitivity to movements unrelated to breathing may
substantially limit their use during exercise. Furthermore, the quality of ECG and PPG signals
decreases in the case of a bad electrode or probe adherence to the skin. With the growing use of
newly available machine learning, artificial intelligence tools, and advanced signal analysis techniques,
respiratory waveforms over time can be retrieved from both raw ECG and PPG signals. A certain
number of validation studies have demonstrated good performance of both methods in structured
environments (e.g., intensive care unit), while far less studies have been performed outside the clinical
scenarios (e.g., during sporting activities). There is a growing interest in this field of research, testified
by numerous articles aiming at presenting new techniques and algorithms to be used in the next future
for the extraction of respiratory variables and fR values [255].

Does it need to be turned on in settings somewhere (I can’t seem to find it) or is it just on by default?

Anyone know whether turning this on impacts battery significantly (like pulse ox)? If not, don’t see any harm in having it on

There is no setting to turn it on or off ! ?

Thanks for all of that!  I understand what respiration rate is, I just didn't know what useful purpose there would be to recording this all day. 

What's interesting is that before this update, in order to record respiration rate you had to be wearing an external HR strap and now you can just record all day with just the watch.  Do you still need the strap for runs though?

So far it shows up in the sleep statistic on Garmin Web. And there is a link to the full day statistic, but it seems its not all there yet, found a dead link. The phone app for Android doesn't seem to support it yet.

Just did a run without my strap and there is no respiration rate recorded.

So it looks like you nedd a stsap while running.

There was a Connect update yesterday for Android and it is showing in my sleep data now in the app .

Thanks. Going for a run right now using my hrm-run.