Peter Gamma (Physiologist & Director) Meditation Research Institute Switzerland (MRIS)

Last Updated on June 5, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

In the Garmin forum it says, accuracy of the Tempe sensor is 1 – 2 degree celcius, which is acceptable for many applications. But it needs to be recalibrated every 10 min by a barometric pressure sensor, which requires GPS on for this function.

Without GPS on, our Fenix 6 temperature values where instable. With GPS on, it worked. But GPS or other options caused distance values in Garmin Connect which where artefacts when using the sensor indoors.

A foot pod can be added to the watch, and the Garmin watch programmed, that the foot pod overrides GPS.

Garmin does not list which watches support autocalibration of the barometric pressure sensor. The more affordable devices from Garmin to not support this option.

We suggest also to search for other solutions. The Adafruit Clue has excellent values as far as accuracy is concerned, but there are issues to use the CLE as a body or ambient temperature sensor, since it is mounted to the sensor board:

https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=191449

There are many temperature sensors available, which are compatible with Home Assistant, and can display temperature in real-time in Home Assistant.

Together with the Polar Sensor Logger app, which should also be compatible with Home Assitant, when connected over MQTT to HA:

https://github.com/burnnat/ha-polar/issues/17

with other parameters from Fitbit, Garmin and Polar, for which there are integrations for Home Assistant available, we already have a bunch of physiological sensors, sensor data can be stored in Home Assistant / InfluxDB, can be visualized in Grafana, and further processed by the InfluxDB client for Python, to do our own data analysis in Python, far away from Garmin Connect, Polar Flow, or the Fitbit Dashboard, where this is not possible.