Garmin Vivosmart 4 | Review and opinion

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As every year, Garmin was faithful to its appointment by presenting a new activity bracelet from the Vivosmart range. Garmin Vivosmart 4announced in September 2018, represents the renewal of the previous successful model, the Vivosmart 3For this occasion Garmin has added a oxygen saturation sensor (o pulse oximeter), with the first activity bracelet to incorporate itCompetitive pressure in this segment is increasing and Garmin's scope for contributing its differences is narrowing.

>> The best activity bracelets

The new Vivosmart 4 ha shrunk, ha increased its autonomy and has a screen more prominent In addition, the new pulse oximeter sensor allows the display of new metrics that were not previously available. Will all this be enough to continue to be a reference in the sector?

• Once again, the strap is not interchangeable
• No connection to external sensors

New Garmin Vivosmart 4

The new features of the Garmin Vivosmart 4 activity bracelet are not overly eye-catching, but as with every new generation, they are certainly there. But even so, Vivosmart 4 has introduced some features that have not yet been seen in the rest of the Garmin range.

• Body Battery function - An algorithm that starts from the information provided by the different sensors and reduces it to a single piece of information: your percentage of daily energy not consumed.
• Pulse oximeter (oxygen saturation sensor) - Used to make SpO2 measurements and, during sleep, to identify the different phases.

These are the two main new developments, but of course they are not the only ones. There are changes for the better in different aspects.

• Strap - Although Garmin continues to make the design of the bracelet in one piece that makes it impossible to change the strap, the quality has improved. It is now somewhat stronger and seems to hold up better over the years. It has been one of the great defects of previous models, because if the strap is broken there is no possible repair.
• Screen - The new OLED screen is much easier to see than the old LCD of the Vivosmart 3. The previous model had a silicone coating that protected the screen and offered a continuous aesthetic throughout the bracelet, is now a screen with a frame around much easier to read in any circumstances
• Size - It's a little narrower now than it was before
• Battery life - The size has been reduced, but that does not prevent the autonomy has been increased. Now the battery holds up to 7 days (instead of 5 in the Vivosmart 3)

Basic aspects

The control of this activity bracelet remains touch-based. The entire screen responds to gestures, and the bottom part (where the horizontal line can be seen) acts as a menu button. You can go through the different widgets by sliding your finger over the screen. And if you click on the bottom you will access the wristband menu. The wristband is able to detect exercise automatically without you starting an activity, although it is preferable that you start and stop when you want so that you can record the whole activity in its entirety. The time it takes to start recording can be set to indicate when it should understand that you are doing the indicated exercise. All the configuration is done through the application, being able to modify alerts or data fields. The options are not very wide, but enough for an activity bracelet. At the daily activity level you can review the main data on the wristband screen, but it is in the application where you will see all the activity information in more detail.

In short, everything works exactly the same as in the previous model, so if you need any more specific details I recommend that you take a look at the Vivosmart 3 testOf course, the Garmin Vivosmart 4 activity wristband has other new features, such as the Body Battery function and the pulse oximeter (which Garmin calls Pulse Ox) I do want to devote a specific section to these two functions, so I will now explain them to you in detail.

- Update September 2019 -

Garmin has added the GPS online function for Vivosmart 4 (and for the new Vivomove 3) through the update 4.00This allows you not only to record the track of the route using the phone's GPS, but also to see actual rhythms and distances on the bracelet display, even if it does not have built-in GPS.

In running/walking the bracelet used the internal accelerometer, so despite not offering real data they had a margin of error of 10%-15%. This is now solved, provided you carry your phone and it goes in an area with good satellite reception (at the bottom of a backpack and looking down would not be valid).

But for activities such as cycling, where there is no movement of the wrist, it is very important. It is a good move on the part of Garmin that puts the Vivosmart 4 at the level of the rest of the competition, especially manufacturers like Fitbit, which already offered this option in some of their models.

Body Battery function

Body Battery is a function that at the moment is at the Vivosmart 4 exclusivelyTo summarize it easily, it indicates the amount of energy we have available until the end of the day. pulse variability, resting heart rate, stress, daily work and dream The more we move and stay active, the more energy we consume. Let's imagine that our body is the battery of your mobile phone. It charges up at night with sleep and consumes energy throughout the day at a greater or lesser rate. If we train, we need a lot of that energy, but if you lie on the couch and watch TV for 4 hours, you'll barely have any energy left. This single figure allows you, in theory, to plan your day so that you know when you have the energy to train or when you need to rest a bit before training. And in the same way, it's also a way of encouraging you to exercise if you see that it's almost bedtime and you still have a 70% of energy left, meaning that you haven't had much activity during the day. In the image above you can see practically everything that affects this measurement.

• On the left side you can see how I am recharging my energy during the night, until I reach 100%.
• The periods of activity are marked in grey
• If there were gray icons they would also indicate automatically detected activities, such as a walk.
• The green icons mark workouts as such, in this case running and registering with another Garmin device.
• The orange lines show the moments of greatest stress throughout the day.

The application itself gives you a fairly detailed analysis of everything that has happened throughout the day. Of course you can check the amount of energy remaining for the rest of the day on the bracelet at any time, although you will not have it as detailed as in the application. Regardless of whether the data is more or less accurate (obviously with the information that counts it won't be accurate at 100% either), I think it's a good idea, since instead of providing a multitude of metrics that aren't easy for everyone to understand, you're reducing everything to a single number. As soon as you receive your bracelet, you'll be curious about all those metrics: how you slept that night, your heart rate during the day and during your rest periods, your level of steps and activity, etc. But when you're tired of looking at all that data after three months, you'll be able to use that one metric, the Body Battery, and determine at a glance if you've been active enough that day.

Garmin Vivosmart 4 Pulse Oximeter

The oxygen saturation sensor or pulse oximeter is the main novelty of the Garmin Vivosmart 4 bracelet at the hardware level. It is not the first time that this sensor is present in any model of the Garmin range, it has been used before in the Garmin Fenix 5X Plus. But the use that each device makes of this sensor is totally different. In the case of the Fenix 5X Plus the Pulse Ox is used for high mountain hikes, being able to track what the blood oxygen rate is as you gain altitude. But in the Vivosmart 4 its use is totally different, here Pulse Ox is used to better understand the quality of sleep during the night. That doesn't mean you can't take a reading at any time of the day, which is in fact totally possible. To obtain this record there is an additional sensor, and the bracelet makes use of a red LED (unlike the heart rate, which uses two green LEDs). This point measurement is for reference only, as it is not recorded anywhere and there is no section in Garmin Connect. It is saved if you activate the possibility of using the pulse oximeter during the night. You will be able to see the phases of REM sleep throughout the night and a graph with the oxygen saturation. But I repeat, exclusively during the night. Unlike the Body Battery, the Pulse Ox function is much more diffuse. The information it provides is not easy and simple to process. We also do not have a way to validate whether this information is accurate or not. Garmin are not the only ones doing this. Fitbit has incorporated the same type of sensor in its Charge 3 to be able to identify sleep problems. But it may still be too early to know what and how we can take advantage of these new measurements.

Real-life operation

So far the theory, but if you come here is because you are looking for the real information, the real thing. And for that nothing better than a real case. When everything is going well with your body you will see that the energy is recovered at night and that it is spent during the day. This is what 1TP10We have to wait and therefore it is not possible to confirm if the readings that the bracelet is giving are correct. We suppose that it is, but there is no way to verify it. But when we are not completely healthy it is easier poder confirm if the bracelet is detecting the same symptoms because you know that you are not well. This is precisely what happened to me tonight. I have been since yesterday afternoon with a fever and the feeling of being sick. The night I had a terrible time with a fever and under 4 blankets. And in the morning I woke up with the feeling of having been run over by a freight train. Has the Garmin Vivosmart 4 bracelet seen all this? Well that is what we will see. This is the reading of Body Batt

Yesterday everything started quite normally, recovering to 100% during the night. In the mid-afternoon I took off the bracelet and didn't put it back on until I was leaving for home, just when I was starting to notice my fever rising. The drop in energy is noticeable, and the bracelet didn't know anything about what had been happening during the afternoon because I wasn't wearing it. But it does detect that the energy is very low when you put it back on your wrist. The next thing you can notice is how it has marked the whole night with a lot of stress, which has led to a very bad rest and no energy recovery. It's exactly how I feel and I think the Body Battery function has perfectly captured the situation of how I feel.

Opinion Garmin Vivosmart 4

The Garmin Vivosmart 4 bracelet is a good continuation of the Vivosmart saga. It continues to add some new features, and I think the Body Battery function is quite accurate. I do not have the same impression of the pulse oximetry sensor, because it does not provide information that can be used by the average user. Body Battery is a very easy concept to understand, and in my experience as you have seen before has been quite accurate. But the pulse oximetry has not provided me with a new data that I can use in my daily life, I really do not know what to do with it.

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