Incident detection stops activity recording

Dear Garmin: Please look into giving us an option here! My problem is that there's often a lot of heavy vibration when I'm mountain biking. This means that I my watch sends off a false alarm ever other ride. It also means that I don't notice the watch vibrating indicating that it is going to send an alert. I usually only find out when my wife calls!

You're expecting Garmin to come up with not a half bake idea that will require either you buy the next iteration of the watch or a more expensive one. This is the (Garmin's) way.

I would ask that you PLEASE include other devices that have Incident Detection as well. I have an Edge 830 for nearly 2 years now, and less than a month on my Fenix 6S Sapphire, and BOTH of these are WAY too aggressive at "detecting" incidents. The Edge has falsely tripped numerous times, both on mountain bike rides, (where it is at least slightly more understandable, but several times the "event" was nothing more than stopping reasonably quickly.) The Fenix tripped today simply because I stopped at a spring water pipe to refill bottles. It STOPPED my ride without even telling me in any way. No request to Save the ride or delete, nothing. I didn't even know it was doing an Incident until it was too late to cancel it, missed it by a second. Happily, I had no cell service so it quickly said the message was not sent. THEN I was able to CANCEL the message to my wife. HOWEVER, I had no idea the ride had been stopped until I'd gone almost a mile further and noticed no lap time reports, glanced at my Fenix, and saw it wasn't even recording anymore. Had to start a new ride, lost some distance and elevation, but also lost my record of a "Gran Fondo" distance ride for October. Okay, not earth shattering, but pretty frustrating that it stopped the ride! My Edge has not ever stopped one, and HAS gotten to the "Incident Reported" state because I didn't get it cancelled in time. I've had the Edge "detect" an incident that was not one, and had to stop the bike to address it, even though it was nothing but a roll over a log or some such, and even though I am still riding fast along the trail. That is just poor design. The SPEED at which an incident needs to be reported to a spouse or friend or whatever is NOT going to make the difference in saving a life, IMO. Letting the DEVICE ITSELF figure out that there IS NO INCIDENT could save lots of trouble by giving a wider timeframe for response, and allowing the intelligence of the device note that all is going on as it was before. NO REPORT NECESSARY!!

I had to turn off what MIGHT be a useful feature because it simply is nothing but a NUISANCE. That is true ONLY because this Feature has not been well designed and implemented. Period.

Any update on this escalation? It starts to annoy me with the same reasons: aborting the incident message stops the activity…

Hi / can anyone please share the response on this. Has happened a couple of times .. at the last end of workouts .. losing all data 

thanks 

I wish I could but I was never contacted :-(

It continues to happen to me, and I'm sure to SO many others. VERY POOR feature in how it is implemented. I just did a road ride 2 days ago using both my EDGE 830 and my FENIX 6 Sapphire. The FENIX, unknown to me, decided I had an "INCIDENT" when I stopped riding and rolled up onto the sidewalk to remove a windbreaker after a long descent. I did not even stop suddenly or lay the bike down too hard or do anything else that I can think of that should have triggered any incident. But after I was done changing and on my way again, I saw a text on my EDGE from my wife, asking if I was okay?  Responding wasn't possible immediately, and before I could stop, I was getting a phone call from her. I surmised what must have happened, got stopped, answered her and assured all was fine, and then went to the FENIX, realizing it must be the culprit. (NOTE that the EDGE, mounted ON the bike, would have been the MOST logical device to sense any jarring impacts, etc but it detected NO issues.) The FENIX, however, did think so, and had sent the notification alert. I hadn't felt the vibration alert, though it must have done so, and in cold weather, the watch was pretty much covered up under my sleeve most of the time... So when I checked it, the only thing it allowed me to do was acknowledge the incident that WASN'T one, choosing something like, send an "I'm OK" message to my wife (who already knew I was ok) and I was totally unable to get back into the ride display. The ride had ended, apparently. 

THIS is one reason I try to ALWAYS USE 2 DEVICES to record my rides, (in spite of the fact that Garmin techs usually question why people do this, almost as if they don't really grasp that for those of us willing to spend this much money on devices, our ride data IS IMPORTANT TO US!) And even when they seem to "get" that, they still suggest deleting one of these records of the ride instead of syncing to Garmin Connect (and other apps.) ... The PROBLEM with that idea is that we STILL lose data, like Strava segments PRs that FREQUENTLY do NOT agree one device to the other, generally 1 or 2 seconds, but I've seen the difference be as much as 10 seconds between the EDGE 830 and the FENIX 6 Sapphire, while BOTH are using the most accurate, 1-second recording frequency, and BOTH using GPS and GLONASS. 

IMO, as I've said before, I do NOT AGREE with the feature of ENDING A RIDE (or other activity) because of an INCIDENT DETECTION. There are FAR MORE DETECTIONS than actual INCIDENTS, and I have usually been UNABLE to stop the INCIDENT response by the device even though I WAS PRESSING THE BUTTONS TO DISMISS them. It just didn't stop anyway, sent the text (or failed to because I was not in a cell service area), and ended my ride. 

Do I understand the possible battery life issues might suggest stopping the activity in case there really IS an incident? Well, yes, MAYBE, but a case can be made that you should NOT stop the activity and the associated data recording, in the interest of safety as well! Continuing the gps recording and the related activity provides those who may already have a link to "follow" that activity can help confirm the person's current location. MAYBE they are still moving! Maybe they are now walking their bike somewhere and potential rescuers can have better info. MAYBE a person has been abducted, MAYBE the person has found a ride, etc etc. In any of these cases, it seems to me that we should assume the person had sufficient battery life left to do their activity and then some. And getting continuously updated info about whereabouts is a GOOD THING! 

I see NO GAIN in Garmin automatically ending an activity, and LOTS OF AGGRAVATION TO GARMIN USERS who have activities ENDED FOR NO GENUINE REASON, which happens probably every day of the world... PLEASE CHANGE THIS, GARMIN!!! PLEASE!!!

I've turned it off myself. It's useless the way it's designed and by Garmin only looking ahead with new products, don't expect to have something fixed on a watch that's already one version behind.

In my opinion, this feature is poorly designed. After an accident, your activity should continue to work and send your watch's current location for at least two reasons:

1. Frequent incorrect activation of the accident function (once while walking, I started clapping the participants of the race and the watch detected an accident, another time, while riding a bicycle over bumps, the watch also triggered the alarm).
2. Even if there is a serious accident, thanks to the watch and enabled location sharing, the contact person can keep track of, for example, to which hospital the owner of the watch was sent.