Garmin has just recently made its optical heart beat sensor available while swimming for Forerunner 245 and Forerunner 945. With this feature you do not have to wear any extra accessories if you are looking forward to tracking your heart beat while swimming. These smart watches will display the information to you right on your wrist. This will also help these smart watches in gathering and compiling other information better with higher accuracy.
Addition of this new feature will increase the accuracy of other metrics as well including the burned calories count and heart beat values.
“Note that there are inherent limitations with the technology that may cause some of the heart rate readings to be inaccurate under certain circumstances. These circumstances include the user’s physical characteristics, the fit of the device, and the type and intensity of the swimming. For the most accurate heart rate during swimming, Garmin recommends using HRM-Swim or HRM-Tri heart rate monitors.” Says a warning added to the Updates and Downloads page by Garmin.
This feature can be used simply by enabling “While Swimming” option in your Wrist Heart Rate settings on both Forerunner 945 and Forerunner 245. While it is important to remember that his feature is available only if your Forerunner 945 is running Software Version 2.8 or higher while Forerunner 245 needs to be on Software Version 3.1 or higher.
Big names like Polar, Coros and Suunto already supported heart rate sensing based on wrists for swimming and now that Garmin has followed this trend, this feature will definitely become a standard in smart watches to come.
Garmin’s recently introduced Vivoactive 4, Vivoactive 4S, Venu and Fenix 6 already carry this feature built into them. All these smart watches incorporate a highly accurate ELEVATE sensor inside their build for precise heart rate monitoring.
