Colmi current HR/SpO2 reads are unreliable and may be stale or mis-parsed

[SymbioSyncProject]

Summary

Colmi current heart-rate / SpO2 reads are not behaving like the vendor app experience. Recent current HR readings appear suspiciously repeated, including repeated 97 values, and on-demand readings can time out.

Observed behavior

• SymbioSync can connect to the Colmi ring and show sleep/activity/battery data.
• Current HR requests have recently timed out or returned suspiciously repeated values.
• SpO2 current reads are also unreliable compared with the vendor app behavior.
• The vendor app appeared to provide on-demand HR and O2 readings consistently, or it was presenting stale/cached values as live.

Expected behavior

SymbioSync should either:

1. produce current HR/SpO2 readings with explicit freshness/source metadata, or
2. clearly report that current readings are unavailable/stale/unknown.

It must not present cached, repeated, timed-out, or mis-parsed values as live body state.

Repro notes

1. Connect Colmi ring.
2. Request current HR / snapshot HR.
3. Compare repeated values and timeouts against expected current body-state behavior.

Truth/safety impact

High. This is biometric-adjacent state. A bridge that shows stale/mis-parsed HR or SpO2 as live body truth is lying in a trust-bearing place.

Investigation direction

Stop guessing. Do a methodical inventory of the curated QRing/Colmi decompiled references and current SymbioSync implementation:

• enumerate all HR/SpO2 current/manual/interval request classes and response parsers
• identify app lifecycle/timing/retry behavior around on-demand measurements
• distinguish live measurement commands from cached/manual/history reads
• verify whether app UI was truthful or presenting cached values as current
• map command IDs, payload layouts, notification parsers, timing, stop behavior, and error codes
• turn findings into a protocol matrix before more implementation changes

Acceptance criteria

• Protocol inventory exists in docs/reference form.
• Current HR/SpO2 request path is either fixed or explicitly marked unavailable/stale with freshness metadata.
• Repeated identical readings are not blindly treated as live without capture-time/freshness evidence.

[SymbioSyncProject]

Added a protocol-inventory scaffold locally for this issue: docs/reference/colmi_protocol_inventory.md.

Purpose: force future Colmi/QRing work through a boring ledger before changing biometric-adjacent behavior. The scaffold separates:

• request id / payload shape
• parser fields
• lifecycle, timing, retry behavior
• live vs manual vs history vs cached reads
• freshness implications
• source quote / confidence
• SymbioSync parity

Also recorded the repeated-97 anomaly: 5,416 local HR rows with reading 97 were quarantined out of normal realtime_heart_rate into suspect_realtime_heart_rate using scripts/quarantine_colmi_hr_readings.py, with a DB backup kept. That was a local data repair, not protocol proof.

Next useful move: fill the ledger from vendor/decompiled QRing/Colmi artifacts before changing HR/SpO2 semantics.