Garmin Fenix 6 - Pulse Oximeter support

Feature requests
1

Hey there,
it would be really fantastic if your App would support Garmin Fenix 6 Pulse Oximeter Data.
So one could rad Heartrate + oxygen saturation … :wink:
thx, bye from Austria
Andreas

2

Hello @Hellkeeper, SPO2 should be working on Garmin devices now…

But please note the following:

There is a large bug in the Garmin communication API which Garmin refuses to fix for years. Occasionally the Garmin Connect Mobile app clogs up the communication between our app and the watch. In that case, we’ve found out that force stopping and then starting the Garmin Connect Mobile app will refresh the comm queue and then it should work normally.

We tried to contact Garmin on this several times but they just ignore this issue. So our patience just run out now and we have moved to a quite nasty but hopefully fuctional workaround.

We’ve just finished an update of the Garmin integration which uses a different method of communication between the app and the watch, which is apparently working much better than the direct method we used before. We use both of those methods simultaneously and if the old one fails, we switch to the new method. From our tests, this has good results and we haven’t had any missed data in any night we’ve been testing with this.
On Vivoactive 3, we’re also seeing around 15% battery drain per 8h of tracking (with HR/HRV on).

If you want to try this, you’re going to need two things - a new Garmin addon for phone, and a new watch app. Both of these are currently labeled as beta and not published for general availability. So to try it, please follow the steps below.

  1. Get beta of the phone addon:
  2. Register for beta testing of the Sleep as Android Garmin addon here >> https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.urbandroid.sleep.garmin
  3. Make sure the beta update gets downloaded on your phone.
  4. Get the updated watch app
  5. First uninstall the Sleep app from your watch using the Garmin Connect app ( Garmin Connect > tap on your watch > Activities & App Management > Activities & Apps > Sleep > Uninstall )
  6. Download the .prg file for your watch model in the list here: https://sleep.urbandroid.org/garmin-beta-watch-app.
  7. Connect your watch to your computer via USB. Put the .prg file on your watch in /GARMIN/APPS folder (just like you would put it on a USB drive).
  8. Run Sleep on your watch!

Please let me know any thoughts or feedback you’d have about this.

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