I've noticed the distance being pretty far off when running on a treadmill. Does anyone know if there is a way to adjust stride length on the Band? I've done this on previous devices and would like to do the same here.
Howdy guys (my first post!) -- I was pleasantly surprised to go on an indoor run (Run mode, GPS off) and within a few steps, see my distance
start incrementing! I've since "reverse engineered" the guess that even with GPS turned off, while in Run mode the Band estimates distance traveled via the accelerometer (in other words, it uses the movement of the arm/wrist to estimate stride distance). This was corroborated in part by the FRUSTRATING fact that every time I held my arm still (while running) to check out the display my pace suddenly got slower.
Two things I noticed: (1) at a really slow pace (11 min/mile) the calibration was miraculously spot-on. But (2) as I sped up to an 8-minute pace all hell broke loose (it far underestimated my true pace).
Sadly, I see no current way on the device to modify the calibration (or as you wondered, change the default stride length). Of course, it doesn't take a PhD in biomechanics and kinesiology to imagine the following:
- for each runner, there is a regular relationship between your running speed, your stride length, and the motion of your arms
- this relationship probably has a regular (though not necessarily linear) pattern over a range of speeds
The "DUH" (smack-self-in-forehead moment) comes when you realize that GPS can be used to tune this function to the particular runner. In other words, you ship the Band with a generic arm-movement -> stride-length function, and then over (say) 10 or 20 runs, you tune the function to fit the actual owner based on their own specific body size and gait pattern.
It may be in fact exactly how the Band works and that it simply takes a few weeks of outdoor GPS-monitored runs before it "calibrates" (which might explain why it was amazingly accurate during my slow indoor run). It will be interesting to see if in fact Microsoft has engineered it that way. Otherwise, yeah I'd expect to see a firmware update where (like on my Garmin) you turn on calibration, run for a predetermined distance (like half a mile), stop, tell the device you just ran half a mile, and then it uses those data to estimate future runs.
EDIT: OK, please hold off on my Nobel-prize nomination....just realized this thread hits many of the points I raised:
http://forums.windowscentral.com/microsoft-band/322065-accuracy-treadmill.html
-Matt