Suunto 7 Treadmill Distance Bug

Nikita_Gx

Hi All,

I have used my new (oh so stunning!) Suunto7 twice this week while running on a treadmill and it surprised me. Instead of 10 KMs it showed close to 16 KMs. This was my home treadmill. I thought that may be the flaw is with the treadmill as if it’s counting miles even though kms are set in the setting :))) How awesome of a mistake would that be:)
All the intervals seemed to fit this pattern, simple mile conversion factor would give me a very close matching distance.

So I gave it another check in my fitness club doing a warmup with 2 KMs. And the result is the same. The watch showed 3 KMs. It’s hard to believe that both treadmills count the distance incorrectly despite KMs being selected in the settings (I checked).

Sooo
Is there a way to calibrate/send a bug to the Suunto team? I have no idea how the watch calculates the distance. I can imagine it matches the arm movements with the step distance (that’s how I would do this). So if this is the algorithm behinds, this should be possible to address.

In contacts I can see only phone support and chatting during the workdays.
Not sure whether either of them will do this
Also the moment I say that I am located in Moscow, I might get switched to the local support which as I presume would have even smaller chances of getting the message to the right people.

I really want this to get fixed as it’s still going to be a couple months before it gets warm w/o any snow on the strees here
I can always go back to the sports tracker application and my suunto smart sensor (which is not compatible with the watch :()) and manually enter the distance/edit the recorded result that is pushed from the watch. But really I wouldn’t want to do that, essentially it’s like doing part of the job you’re expecting from the tracking device.

Thank you

sartoric

@Nikita_Gx
I’m not sure if S7 works as the other watches, but to calibrate/enhance precision for indoor running, you need to do some outdoor runs first.

isazi

And in this case, if this is a bug, @Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos can report it to the devs.

@Nikita_Gx Sadly, indoor accuracy leaves a lot to be desired. I run on treadmill at home after a 7 mile run outside that included a variety of paces. Had to stop after 2 miles because S7 was almost minute and a half off compared to treadmill and Stryd/S9 on my other hand.

pilleus

Hey, the S7 is a watch for life and sports! In both categories running means a fast move or change of location from point a to point b.

The S7 is working great in life and sports!

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

Its very diffucult to match the distance of the threadmill using a wrist based solution. It’s even difficult for the pods todo so.

Why dont you edit the distance in the Suunto app?

Egika

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos if you edit in the app, then still synced services get the initial data.
Plus: the Spartans and S Series watches do a pretty good job at calibrating themselves with GPS based runs.
I found the error for indoors being small only.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@Egika the same happens with the S7 so I dont know how to help.

But #notsure turning off wifi etc before editing the distance doesn’t help ?

Egika

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos said in Suunto 7 Treadmill Distance Bug:

But #notsure turning off wifi etc before editing the distance doesn’t help ?

I did that. No change. Also disconnecting the strava/endomondo etc. services first does not help.
The fit file for download does not get the change as well.

Manuel Silvestri

I have the same problem…10 minutes of treadmill and the S7 shows only 0.3 km in distance. Again, my old Fenix 5 did much better than this…with a technology of 3 yrs ago!! It’s very frustrating!

vlado

@Manuel-Silvestri You will never get good results on treadmill without foot pod, calculating the distance based on arm movements is not the way. My previous watch was Fenix 5 and it was never good, not even close

Manuel Silvestri

@vlado Mine was close to the distance displayed in the treadmill…ok, the difference could be 200-300 m, but not more than 1km as for the S7

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

Unofficially I can say that this is “known” and will be improved.

Nikita_Gx

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos , thank you for replying
I tried that yesterday and the journal/diary on the watch does not provide an option to edit the results. It’s only possible on the phone in the app. And then there is another issue with sync working only one way. If I edit the exercise on the phone it will not reflect on my watch still showing the original results.

I believe it will be a couple of months before I can check any auto-calibration after running outside.

Nikita_Gx

To be honest taking the average distance by the number of arm strides across he excercises sounds like a blunt solution to me. I mean there gotta be some hardcoded multiplier value which is used in calculation of distance. It’s hard to believe that all the manufacturers don’t care enough to get this right. Also I recall some interesting stats that was published by Suunto. Majority of watch users in North America work out at gyms as opposed to France where people mostly go outside. Hard to belive that the biggest market majority is ignored to this extent. I do understand that treadmill outputs are more reliable but then all the tracking done by the watch including all the fancy metrics go down the drain. I can also imagine that all the fancy metrics even after manual adjustments don’t look reliable at all.

sartoric

@Nikita_Gx said in Suunto 7 Treadmill Distance Bug:

. It’s hard to believe that all the manufacturers don’t care enough to get this right.

I don’t think that it’s a matter of “caring” but it’s more a matter of getting enough data to evaluate distance only based on internal sensors.

Without a calibration it’s hard to do it. Every athlete is different, eg. Moves in a different way the arms when runs.

Nikita_Gx

@sartoric , absolutely agree with you. Being in planning solutions development myself, if you ask me how I would address this I would make the following depending on the available data (which I am certain you capture anyway but not necessarily store in a databse).

Record the run with wrong distance results but capture number of arm strides.
Send the data to the phone/webb app.
(Make) User edit the distance and recalculate the metrics
Make watch get a sync from the phone/web app and ingest the updated data.
Update that hidden multipler dividing Distance run (after user edit) divided by number of strides made. You capture steps, I am sure you can capture strides, should be even easier.
Go back to #1 through #4 for a new run
Update the hidden multiplier based on either Average/Moving average for 1-100 previous stride to distance ratios seamlessly making the distance calc better every time.
Repeat #1 through #7.

At the same time this does not necessarily contradict with having outside runs with gps for calibration (which we are all not certain whether it’s the case with our lovely S7). Alongside/instead you give the user more control over the calibration taking into account all the things that are so very individual to every runner.

Hope this makes sense.

@Nikita_Gx I think there’s an easier solution, and it has been used in Garmin watches for years. The first time you start and record treadmill activity, a screen pops up at the end asking to adjust a recorded distance relative to what the right number is (maybe treadmill’s distance or whatever you think it should be as treadmills aren’t accurate either). That’s used to provide for internal calibration factor for future runs.

Nikita_Gx

I managed to have a couple of runs outside before all this quarantine stuff started. After that the calibration at the treadmill became a lot better.
However, I am still lost with regards to the outputs.

Treadmill run count:
Treadmill: 10 KM
Suunto App: 12 KM
Google Fit (after sync with Suunto App): 16.69 KM

Before Google Fit I thought that Treadmill count would be the source of truth. However, I am not so sure anymore.

I assume more outside runs should level off the difference, or it could just confirm that treadmill is wrong. But the difference is more or less substantial so far.

One more thing to try is a run with only google fit.