Until October 6, Voke could show a “High heart rate” entry in your Feed, marked “while inactive”, for a time when you were plainly exercising. One of ours read 146 bpm, in the middle of a workout. That’s the kind of mistake that makes you stop trusting the rest of the app, so here’s what went wrong and what we changed.
What the alert is
A heart rate alert in Voke is an entry in your own Feed. It says your heart rate stayed high, or low, for a while when your data shows you weren’t moving.
The rule:
- High means 120 bpm or more. Low means 40 bpm or less.
- It has to last at least 10 minutes. Short breaks of up to 5 minutes are joined into the same stretch, as long as you weren’t active during the break.
- Every one of those minutes has to be a minute where you were confirmed to be still. More on that below.
The entry shows when it started and the highest or lowest reading in that stretch.
The 120 and 40 limits follow the defaults Apple Watch and Fitbit use for their own high and low heart rate notifications. A high heart rate while you’re running is expected. The same heart rate while you’re sitting at your desk is worth a second look. What changes your resting heart rate covers the slower day-to-day shifts.
What went wrong
Before the fix, Voke decided you were inactive in a minute if you took 20 steps or fewer in it. The trouble was what counted as “20 steps or fewer”.
Google Health sends steps in one-minute pieces, but only for minutes that had steps in them. A minute with no step record could mean you stood still. It could also mean the band didn’t record steps for that minute at all, which happens during plenty of activities. Voke read every missing minute as zero steps, and zero steps meant inactive.
So during that workout, a few minutes had no step record and were treated as still. Other minutes had a handful of steps and also counted as still. The 5 minute rule then joined those stretches together across the minutes that did have plenty of steps. The result was a run of more than 10 “inactive” minutes, every one at 120 bpm or more.
The band had recorded active minutes for every one of those minutes. Voke wasn’t looking at them.
There was a second gap. A workout should rule an alert out on its own, but Voke wasn’t importing exercise sessions from Google Health at all. So there was no workout in Voke to say “this person was exercising”.
What we changed
A minute only counts as inactive when the data says so. That means one of two things: a step record shows 20 steps or fewer for that minute, or Google’s sedentary data covers it. A minute with neither isn’t treated as still. It’s unknown, and an unknown minute can never be part of an alert.
Activity rules a minute out. A minute is active, and never part of an alert, when it has more than 20 steps, when your device recorded any active minutes for it (light, moderate or vigorous), or when it falls inside a workout.
Breaks only join when you were still. The 5 minute join no longer bridges across a minute where you were active or working out.
Google exercise sessions are imported. Workouts recorded in Google Health now show in your Feed, with their steps, distance and heart rate, and they rule out alerts for that time, the same as Apple Health workouts already did.
Activity shows up even without a workout. Fitbit only records an exercise session when it recognises at least 15 minutes of continuous movement, or when you start one yourself. Plenty of walks don’t make it. So now, when your device records 10 or more minutes of moderate or vigorous activity, with pauses of no more than 2 minutes, Voke shows it in the Feed as an “Activity” entry with its length, steps and heart rate. If a recorded workout already covers that time, you see the workout instead, not both.
Alerts are worked out from your minute data each time the Feed loads, so the wrong one from that workout is gone, along with any like it.
What it costs
Being stricter means Voke will sometimes stay quiet when it shouldn’t. If your device records neither steps nor a sedentary period for a stretch, Voke can’t tell whether you were still, and it won’t show an alert there. We think a missing alert is a better mistake than a false one, but it’s a trade-off, and you should know it’s there.
What the alert isn’t
Voke isn’t a medical device, and this isn’t a diagnosis (our health disclaimer says more). It doesn’t look at heart rhythm, it doesn’t know what medication you take or how hot the room was, and it can’t tell you whether a reading matters. It only reads what your watch or band already recorded and points to a stretch that matched the rule above.
Alerts are only in your own Feed. Nobody in your circles sees them.
If you feel unwell, or a reading worries you, talk to a doctor.
If you see an alert that doesn’t match what you were doing, tell us. That’s how we found this one.