heart rate values totally wrong after update 18.22

18.27 on 955 Solar here. Same Problem (130 BPM for a few Minutes where it should be 160, than jumping on 160). Updated to 19.18 today, further investigating. 

Struggling with this problem since September 2023.  I am solving by placing the watch upside down the wrist and not on top of the wrist

Triathlon - sensible numbers for the swim 140s, bike 160-170 and then way too high for the run 210+  (my max is around 185)



I'd expect the run to be the more accurate measurement

I am struggling with this problem since September 2023 on my Forerunner 955 after about 1 year from new. 

I had solved by rotating the watch upside down to the bottom of the wrist and not as officially from Garmin to the top of the wrist.

It has a quite good reading placed upside down. No jumps, pretty stable and in line with a chest band

Sierra you wrote me NOT to send other example as you have plenty enough some weeks ago. Still same problem on first minutes of an activity HR raise too high and by simply placing the watch upside down the bottom of the wrist all correct. I wear the watch always like that as not consistent the HR measure from the Top. Not a matter of temperature as we are almost in summer and same problem we have in winter and in summer. 

4977680, I wrote you that because you had already been added to our internal report and we had plenty of examples from you. Thank you for your participation.

sometimes it's pretty consistent

sometimes it's just wrong until it either suddenly gets it right, or I've noticed it's wrong and move the watch 180 degrees to under my wrist to try and get it back on track

this triathlon example is bad, since it's gone from pretty accurate to over reading for the last 1/3 of the activity - so it's lost tracking, rather than finding the correct 'beat' after a while

what's poor here, is that the detection algorithm does not 'filter' this inaccuracy given it's way beyond my max heart rate

my general feel would be that it's got worse with later firmware versions, but it may just be that we're all looking out for this issue more ?

and this one from 2022 shows it getting it wrong for the first few minutes, then the rest looks fine - so older firmware also shows errors, but perhaps less often

I went from forerunner 935 to 955. The optical HRM has NEVER worked properly the 955 during activities. I've just had to use a HRM strap. Main issue was it just doesn't seem to detect any HR changes when I'm doing intervals. It seems to take a minute or so to start to change but it never gets to the real HR. Very sad as its 5 year newer than the 935 and ~50% more expensive. This must be a hardware issue and sad to hear its on even newer models too...

I've had it for 2 years now and always reminded of this flaw when I forget my strap for an activity.

Here I think is the problem you describe, in a 255 running firmware 19.18. I was troubleshooting HR tracking issues by restricting the watch to optical (wrist) HR while tracking a bluetooth chest strap to Polar Beat on the phone. This is a workout with 7 intervals, and as you can see, the watch misses the HR (but not the power) of the first three intervals while the chest strap gets them fine.