Adjusting stride on Apple Health App?

[vito]

I really like the Health app that came standard on my I-phone6, even if I only use it to measure how far I walk. At first I thought it "overmeasured", that is, it showed me walking about 10% further than I think I really did. I've never found any way to calibrate the way it measures distance (I have no clue how it works at all) but today I took my dog for a walk on a measured bike path of 2.5 miles, and the app showed that I walked only 1.7! I just leave the phone in my front pocket when I am out of the house, just as I always have. Is there some way to adjust the stride that a person walks so that the distance measurement would be more accurate? Hoping we have some gifted I-phone users on this forum.

 

[tookalisten]

I have been wondering about this myself. After reading your post, I went on the Apple forum and found this:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6860574

 

[Mobuck]

That's funny. You need your phone to tell you how far you walked? I don't WANT TO KNOW how far I walk in a day, week, month. Mostly because at least 1/3 of that distance is backtracking because I forgot what I was supposed to do at the place I just left.
Son's employer gave everyone those little gadgets that count steps and gives incentives for exercise. One trip he forgot to take the gadget so told his Daughter to carry it for a couple of hours a day. When he got home the thing showed "he" had walked something like 40 miles. Steps, jumps, hops, and little girl dancing were all added at adult pace length.

 

[vito]

Thanks Tookalisten for the link. Very interesting. When I use the GPS function on my Iphone for driving somewhere it works fine. But obviously the GPS data used for the Health app is not the same. My measured walk that I used for the start of this thread is almost exactly 2.4 miles, which I verified with a hand held Garmin GPS navigator. The Health App showed that I had traveled 1.7 miles, almost 30% less. I guess this App is really pretty useless, which ironically is what I thought when I first saw it on the Iphone. I wonder now (and I will try this soon) if at the start of my walk I asked Siri to measure the distance I have walked between this request and the final request, if Siri is capable of doing this (probably not because Siri, I assume, is strictly reactive to requests and likely cannot measure future activity even if asked to do so).

 

[Jimbo357mag]

...At first I thought it "overmeasured", that is, it showed me walking about 10% further than I think I really did. ... today I took my dog for a walk on a measured bike path of 2.5 miles, and the app showed that I walked only 1.7! ...

I think you need to do some more testing over a measured distance if you want to calibrate for accuracy.

 

[coach]

I haven't tried to ask Siri to measure distance, but you can ask it to set reminders and such. I wouldn't be surprised if it can.