Suunto 7 Treadmill Distance Bug

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.