Alta HR active minutes disappeared

[Chinoiseries]

Earlier today, my Alta HR notified me that I'd made it to 60 active minutes. Hurray! After I arrived home, I'd walked about 7 km, I synced with my Android phone and tadaa, my steps were accurately synced but my active minutes showed a 0. Is this a known issue? I reset my Fitbit as instructed, but no miraculously recovered active minutes.

Moderator edit: subject for clarity

[NellyG · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately restarting wont reinstate lost data. The loss may be in your app rather than the tracker though, so I'd suggest removing the tracker, uninstalling the app, reinstalling it and then re adding your Alta HR. Again this probably wont restore lost data, but hopefully will fix it for the future.

[Chinoiseries]

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't tried this yet, but will give it a go and hope for the best!

[cllsjhsc]

I have tried this fix many times before, it doesn't work. I unpaired, uninstalled, reinstalled, repaired yesterday. I went for a bike ride this morning, registering 51 active minutes, took it off to shower, after putting it back on it read 0. I am so frustrated with this. Time to buy a new tracker. Never had this issue with the original Charge HR.

[MariamV]

@cllsjhsc welcome to the forums! Thanks for reporting this issue. To gain active minutes your Alta HR will calculate them by using metabolic equivalents (METs). METs help measure the energy expenditure of various activities. Because they do so in a comparable way among persons of different weights, METs are widely used as indicators for exercise intensity. For example, a MET of 1 indicates a body at rest. Fitbit trackers estimate your MET value in any given minute by calculating the intensity of your activity.

You earn active minutes for activities at or above about 3 METs. To stay in line with the Center for Disease Control's (CDC’s) “10 minutes at a time is fine” concept, minutes are only awarded after 10 minutes of continuous moderate-to-intense activity. You can view the CDC’s recommendations here. If an activity gives you active minutes one day and fewer active minutes the next day, remember that the intensity of exercise is key. Often what seems like the exact same amount of effort over the same distance in fact differs slightly enough to change your active minutes total. However, this doesn't seem to be the case about what you are describing.

In order to have a better picture of the situation, I'd like to request a screenshot of the issue you're describing od your Active Minutes not showing.

Also, just our of curiosity are you using any Third Party apps to log in your exercise? If you are do let me know!

Looking forward to your new comments! 

[cllsjhsc]

Yes, I use Strava to record my bike rides. However, I fail to see how that effects active minutes with my tracker. I ride the bike, the tracker records active minutes. The phone & tracker do not sync during exercise, as I have no data. It syncs again when I get home and onto wifi. When I get home, My dashboard shows the exercise, the tracker shows 54 minutes. Sometime later in the day I look again and it is now 0 active minutes, but the exercise is still there. During that time it has synced over and over again, as I have it set to constant sync. I have called customer service about this several times, the last time they spent an hour walking me through resets, then told me the problem was not with the tracker, but must be with my phone. FYI, this was never a problem with the Charge HR which I wore previously, only had this issue since I got the Alta HR as a replacement. This issue has been intermittent since I got the Alta HR in March 2017. I say intermittent because today the active minutes have stayed on the tracker. That makes one day this week, all the other days of exercise have "lost" the minutes. Thanks for responding. I am not confident that this is an issue that can be fixed.

[MariamV]

@cllsjhsc thanks for joining us! The reason why I was asking is because after linking your accounts you may see some differences in the way data (including active minutes) is calculated for your exercises on each site. For more information, refer to Strava's Calorie Calculation article. 

Also, please note that if you already recorded an activity with Strava, a Fitbit activity that occurs at the same time won't sync. That could be one of the reasons why your active minutes are disappearing.

I recommend checking out this post with more info about Strava and Fitbit. Feel free to post back!

[SeaChels]

I lost my active minutes and 2,000 steps when my Alta HR failed to log my exercise and I added it myself. Once I deleted the exercise, my active minutes and steps reappeared. Leaving this post in case someone else has had the same experience and not realize what happened. 

[Catie2892]

@SeaChels I've been having this problem lately with mine. If I run on the treadmill it acknowledges my active minutes but won't give me credit for exercise. So I manually added my exercise and it removes my active minutes. I know manually logging gets rid of your data but if I have active minutes shouldn't I also get a exercise log as well? 

[NellyG]

@Catie2892 Not necessarily. If Smart Track doesnt recognise the activity you are doing you wont be credited with any activity, but you may well get active minutes if your heart rate is up enough. They are separate functions and the tracker doesnt look at one and assume about the other. In order for exercise to register as an activity it either has to recognise it or you have to log it manually (but then you get the loss of data hassles).

[Catie2892]

Well that is incredibly frustrating. I don’t get the difference between me walking/running outside or on the treadmill but if I use the treadmill I don’t get credit for my exercise. I’m still swinging my arms like I would outside. I wish I could log it without the loss of data too 😭😭

[Stephanie86326]

Thanks so much! You figured it out! I have called support and chatted online, reset, uninstalled, unpaired, but you were right. The solution is to accept the active minutes, without logging the exercise. As soon as I deleted the activity, my minutes came back! I can log the exercise into My Fitness Pal and leave it out of Fitbit!

[Stephanie86326]

I use My Fitness Pal to log my exercise.

[Agrarian]

I have a Fitbit Charge3. I sync to the Fitbit app on my iPhone 7.

I just went on a 35 minute walk. I know this because my Charge3 showed this when I looked at it on my wrist. Within 5 minutes after seeing that, I looked again and it now says 0 minutes. This happened after syncing my Fitbit to the Fitbit app.

Also, the Fitbit app logged my walk. It’s there. So why did it 1) not sync the activity minutes and 2) delete the activity minutes from my Fitbit (35 minutes to 0 minutes)?

[tnnskttykat]

I found this thread after having the same issue. I have since figured out that if I log my activity at a different time than I completed it, the data (steps etc.) is not removed. I was able to retain my active minutes and steps. Maybe when logging an activity manually that occurred at the same time that your device recorded active minutes, overwrites the data it auto recorded. This is the only solution I've found anywhere that works. The only caveat I've seen is that you don't get your correct heart rate zones and other exercise data in the log. However, if you are more interested in keeping total steps, active minutes, miles, and weekly exercise goal, this could be a good solution for you.

[Aly1310]

This started happening with me yesterday...I'd exercise... see my active minutes on my watch gained... even see it after I sync to the app...but at some point of the day when my watch syncs to the app again all of my active minutes disappear from both my watch and the app. I'm beginning to feel really frustrated about this and from what I'm reading there's no solution to fix yet on this forum...? I'm using an inspire hr and syncing to a Samsung s20 plus if this helps  🤷‍:female_sign:

[Linpa]

I just had this same problem with my alta HR. I went for a 34 minute walk and it logged 34 active minutes on both my fitbit and the app. Then when i synced again, (as I seem to have o sync several times to see the walk details appear) it had gone down to 22 minutes. I think each time it synced it went down some more and now it says 0 active minutes. The walk details never showed up.

This is super frustrating as I use this to manage a health problem. My phone app is on an iphone 6. But i have never had this issue before today. I don't use any other fitness apps or log anything manually. I REALLY hope this can get fixed. I need to be able to see what my heart rate is doing during a walk.

[Aly1310]

I eventually uninstalled and deleted the fitbit app and then reinstalled it....it didn't recover the information that was lost but it stopped clearing all my new active minutes