Breathing variations

bwyspa said:

What does it matter if Garmin adds useless gimmicks to my watch? Well, it means they do not spend their resources on fixing features that were supposed to work when they introduced the watch. Or fixing features that used to work, but somehow they managed to break them. So, yes, it does matter to me.

I actually agree with all this (and I'm one of Garmin's biggest critics when it comes to bugs), but my points remain:

- Garmin will not stop adding gimmicks, no matter what we do (there's also zero chance that Garmin will drop everything and focus on fixing bugs until no bugs remain)

- To say that this specific feature is a gimmick based on the vagueness of the doc and the text in the UI misses the point that Garmin probably did that on purpose, to avoid any appearance of making a medical diagnosis. (In fact they explicitly say that it is *not* a medical diagnosis). The fact that the APAC versions of the 570/970 manuals have detailed and *useful* information about the feature proves my point

My point about gimmicks not mattering is more directed to the kind of user who gets mad when Garmin adds gimmicks, but also gets mad when those gimmicks aren't added to their own watch.

Some people have to have all the features, even if they never knew they existed until now. That's the kind of mindset I'm referring to.

no  :) Unicode rulez

flocsy🤠 said:

I didn't know Garmin employees use unnamed accounts. Or is this just an opportunistic Chat-bot? Of course nobody stops you changing your name to something suggesting you're a Garmin employee, even if you aren't :) 

They will probably eventually edit their post in to include a spam link. Same modus operandi as past spammers who have made nonsensical posts / comments.

flocsy🤠 said:

Of course nobody stops you changing your name to something suggesting you're a Garmin employee, even if you aren't :) 

I'm gonna go ahead and guess that the forums won't let us put "Garmin" or "Connect.IQ" in our names, although I suppose one might try to circumvent those rules in the same way that I circumvented the profanity filter

I also thought it's a new spammer, but this account is active for at least 3 years (that's when it's 2nd most recent post was) and more interestingly it is in the top 50%

I'm trying to return this discussion to the original topic. Based on the FlowState's more detailed descriptions in the APAC version documentation, I'm not really surprised that Garmin has decided to replace it with a much more vague version for majority of the world. The APAC docs say "...if your SpO2 percentage drops by more than 3%, and lasts for longer than 10 seconds. This is referred to as a breathing variation". On the other hand, studies have shown that even when the wrist is immobile, the accuracy of Garmin SPO2 measurement is quite low (root mean squared error of 6.7 % was mentioned in one source). So, detecting and counting reliably real 3 % changes with that kind of accuracy is hard, especially if you are a restless sleeper. So using a "severity level based on the American Academy of Sleep Medicine criteria for diagnosing sleep apnea" is probably not a good idea, because those severy levels are meant to be used with medical grade SPO2 measuring data.

The same sources also report that the failure level of Garmin SPO2 was quite high (the watch failed to report an SPO2 %). That could explain why so many people are failing to get a breathing variation report for many nights: It's possible that the watch just couldn't get enough SPO2 % measurements during the night to make any breathing variation analysis.

Here's one SPO2 accuracy study I found: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../