Google Health 5.11 is introducing an expanded function for the automatic detection of physical activities, already announced in preview by Google together with the presentation of Fitbit Edge. The update aims to recognize a much higher number of workoutsmaking daily monitoring more comprehensive and reducing the risk of unrecorded sessions.
The news concerns Fitbit Air and smartwatches Pixel Watch 3, Pixel Watch 4 and Pixel Watch 5which pass from the recognition of 10 activities to over 100. Supported categories include cardio machine workouts, golf, high intensity sessions, racket sports, strength training, swimming and team sports. Fitbit Edge will also benefit from the improvement.
To identify workouts, Google Health combines several pieces of information: the user’s usual routines, historical data, manually entered changes, and geographic location, when the necessary permission was granted. The system uses these elements to evaluate the context and formulate forecasts on the activities carried outprogressively adapting to personal habits.
Google Health and the new workout recording system
The training sessions come register automatically when they produce a sustained increase in heart rate and respect a pre-established minimum duration. A notification with the activity summary appears in the app, generally within 30 minutes. Users can confirm or modify detected sessions and add missing ones, thus helping to improve subsequent automatic identifications.
According to Google, the new system offers detections almost twice as accurate and reduces unrecognized workouts by more than half. The goal is to make tracking more reliable without requiring users to manually record each session. The corrections made by the user actually help the system to better recognize his habits over time.
Expanded tracking is coming with Google Health 5.11. The update is already widely available on iOS, while the rollout on Android is still underway. After updating the app, some users see an intro screen titled “Expanded activity tracking, designed to learn“, which presents how the new technology works.
