Recording Of Activity

Status: Current implemented behavior. Audience: Users and contributors. Implementation: features/manualentry/activity, features/manualentry/activity/recording, features/activity. Navigation: Screen.ActivityEntry, Screen.ActivityEntryEdit, ManualEntryWidgetId.ACTIVITY. Related: Feature map, Activity and training plans, Bluetooth LE sensors.

OpenVitals can record activities locally, review the result, and then save the activity to Health Connect.

GPS Activity

GPS recording is for route-backed activities such as walking, running, or cycling. The recording flow can track location points, distance, elevation, moving time, pauses, and route preview data. When the activity is finished, the user reviews the draft before saving it to Health Connect.

The recording flow supports:

• Start, pause, resume, finish, and discard.
• A persistent recording notification.
• A configurable recording dashboard.
• Focus mode for a cleaner in-recording view.
• A high-contrast outdoor mode for better readability in bright conditions.
• Keep-screen-on support when enabled.
• Offline route maps when map packs have been imported.
• Post-activity speed and cadence charts when compatible samples are available.

Elevation Gain

GPS altitude is noisy, and adding up every small rise between points inflates elevation gain badly. OpenVitals smooths the route and requires a real change before it counts, so the gain matches the climbing that actually happened.

How big a change has to be depends on how sure the phone is of each fix. Indoors, under trees, or beside tall buildings the altitude can be tens of meters off while the position still looks usable, so a point needs a change at least as large as its own altitude error, and a fix less certain than 20 m does not count towards the climb at all. Routes without altitude accuracy, such as imported GPX files, keep the fixed threshold.

The barometer is preferred when the phone has one. A reading outside the range of real air pressure, or one implying a jump of more than 50 m between two readings, is treated as a sensor fault and adds nothing.

The climb shown for each split, on the recording screen and in a saved activity’s splits, comes from the same filtered route, so the splits add up to the total. A climb is counted a few seconds after it happens, so a split boundary in the middle of a climb can move a few meters of it into the next split.

Repetition Activity

Repetition-oriented flows support activities such as strength training, push-ups, pull-ups, rope skipping, treadmill steps, and similar workouts where counts, sets, or repetition stats matter more than a GPS route.

Depending on the activity and available sensors, OpenVitals can show repetition counts, set details, rest timing, heart-rate context, and review data before saving.

Guided Heart-Rate Recovery Test

With a connected Bluetooth LE heart-rate sensor, a timed recording can run as a guided heart-rate recovery test:

1. Warm up, for a configurable time that defaults to three minutes.
2. Go hard, until an optional target heart rate is reached or the effort is ended by hand.
3. Stop, and stay still while the app measures how quickly the heart rate falls.

Each phase change is announced with a bell, a spoken cue, and a vibration. The cues are part of the protocol, so they are not optional.

The moment the effort stopped is saved to Health Connect as a rest segment running to the end of the session, which is how the measurement is found again later. That mark is not kept in the crash-recovery draft: the heart-rate samples exist only in memory, so a recording restored after a crash comes back as an ordinary one rather than claiming a measurement with no data behind it.

Sensor Support

OpenVitals has experimental Bluetooth LE support for paired heart-rate, cycling cadence, cycling speed, cycling power, and footpod devices during recording. A wheel speed sensor gives a ride its distance without GPS; see Bike sensors. Bluetooth and notification permissions are requested only where Android requires them.