I view my time during the day as divided between “intentional workouts” where I want to manually start the tracking, and “ambient activity” that does not need to be literally assigned into categories, i.e. walking around the house, putting away dishes, etc.
For the latter, I only care if the watch can perhaps increase my active calorie burn when it notices this movement. That is, on a lighter day my BMR (basal metabolic rate) is around 1600 calories and my active calories is about 400 making a total TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) of about 2000.
Let’s say it’s winter and there’s been a snow storm so I need to go shovel the driveway. If I can look to my calories and see that it’s higher at say 600 for a total 2200 for the day then that’s sufficent to me. I don’t need a HR graph and full metrics for this event like I would doing a 5km interval workout. It’s not like I’m often doing “snow shoveling” where I want to compare performance across multiple sessions.
Additionally, the Resources metric I can use to judge overall ambient activity for the day. Days where this has drained lower means my body was under more physiological stress, and I can use that to gauge my recovery needs for the next day.
So I do sort of get wanting some automatic tracking; in particular, going for a walk I’ve seen Apple Watch trigger detection and ask if I’m walking in the past; I typically say “no” to this as I don’t consider quick five minute walks from one part of a college campus to another worth tracking and just noting higher calorie burn is sufficient, but I can see how others might like to capture this activity. However, if I was getting micro 100m-200m walks from just doing gardening in my back yard I’d find it annoying and would turn off the feature.
So for those who are asking for this, perhaps notice whether or not Suunto is registering higher calories, lower resources, or other things during these “missed times,” and whether that data may be useful while you wait for future enhancements in automatic tracking.
