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Incorrect heartrate reading during activity

NotSoAthletic
over 5 years ago

Hello,

I have purchased the Forerunner 45 to replace my Vivomove HR as I wanted to upgrade to more functionality and Body battery and GPS features.

My unit is working great however is showing an unexpected behavior.

- When I start the "Walking" activity with the Start/Stop button, the activity starts normally. I have setup the watch face during activity to show me distance under the current time, so there are 2 data lines shown (black font on a white background).

However, sometimes during activity, my watch displays a black-background screen, with a red heart icon, and showing "Heart Rate 255" (white font). Of course that's not true, 255 seems like a "default" reading.

Without doing anything, the screen then comes back to normal.

Do you notice this behavior too ?

When  I setup the activity watch face to display my heart rate, the reading is accurate and I have no issue.

Sorry for my english.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Ah, just now I wanted to open a thread about this very problem. Because I drafted the posting beforehand, I paste it as an "answer". :)

    A week or so ago, I bought a FR 45. First, everything seemed to be ok and I haven't noticed any problems during the first training (running). But during the last three trainings, the device says at least twice per minute that the heart frequency is 255. I think I would notice such a high heart rate and it must be a measuring error. But what could be the reason for this? Because it was very warm I thought that sweat could be the problem. But after drying the skin there was no improvement and I still got these messages. The FIT files don't show this distortions, at least the statistics show only reasonable values for the max heart rate.
    Am I doing something wrong or is this a (known?) hardware/software problem? Anyhow, These wrong error messages are annoying and I would like to get rid of them. Any hints/information is appreciated.

    btw, firmware version 2.50 is installed.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to beedaddy

    Glad to see I am not alone ! This device is quite new so bugs must be ironed out. Those readings are not saved so it's not a critical issue.

    I have also noticed that sometimes my "active minutes" are not registered (showing "0" even if I am quite active). It registered 130 active minutes in one day once, only after a reset, and then, nothing the following days. On my old Vivomove HR, some active minutes were registered every day.

    That being said, the heartbeat monitor on the Forerunner 45 seems to be more accurate than the one on my Vivomove HR.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Yesterday, I chose a different training unit and there was no single incorrect heartrate measurement. I don't know why, but everything was ok. Tomorrow I will do this training again and I'm curious to see whether the incorrect heartrates will return.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    Here I am reporting the same error for the Garmin Forerunner 45 that my girlfriend uses. It is on the latest 2.60 firmware.

    Yesterday the 5 km run was perfect,  but today her watch buzzed constantly giving false alerts that her heart rate was 195, spiking out of the blue from 145-150 to 195 multiple times during a very casual run. 195 is the max heart rate that's configured in her watch.

    Former Member Can you please report this bug to the dev team? There are many people suffering from this issue already. Moving the watch up or down the hand didn't do anything to fix this problem!

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    The strange part is that I don't see the 195 bpm entries in the run when I check Garmin Connect app. But the watch buzzed like 10 times with the 195 warning. Do you see your spikes in the charts? 

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to floppyrom

    No, as I mentioned above, I can't see these strange values in the FIT files (and thus not in the charts). And since some days there are no errors any more. I have no idea what has caused them or what made them go away. Unamused

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    I have the same issue. When running a workout with heart rate zones I get the same message 'Heart rate 255 with a heart' at random times. This is really annoying. 

    As the original post is from 2 months ago, has garmin offered a solution or a bugfix for this? 

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    A value of 255 most likely will indicate an invalid_hr_sample (while the fr45 unfortunately does not support connect iq data fields, it does most likely use the same internal backend structure as in this api reference: https://developer.garmin.com/downloads/connect-iq/monkey-c/doc/Toybox/ActivityMonitor.html )

    So instead of the 255 you should read the value as "--" (just ignore this reading, I'm not valid).

    Are you wearing the watch properly? I have no problem at all with the wrist heart rate monitor (works great even when running intervals), I wear the watch tight (but comfortably tight, so that I can endure multiple running hours) making sure that there's no external light entering the sensor, wearing the watch just above the wrist bone knob.

    (when not running I losen the watch a notch)

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to peterdedecker

    I believe I have this same *display* issue as well, and would really like it fixed.

    I get this display when i'm doing a workout with a HR zone threshold, and i'm not in the target zone. My issue with this is, its not telling me if i'm above / below where i should be, and what i should be at! I could in general believe 255 means --, but it would leave me wanting if the message didn't give me a more useful clue.

    I'm also disappointed that this bug has existed for 4 months, and still not addressed in todays (3.0.0) firmware.