Active minutes as primary statistic

[NelsonNick]

Are there any plans to allow active minutes to be the primary goal. I bike a lot and the current choice of steps and floors etc are not very useful. the only stat tht seems to be relevntly tracked for me is active minues

[SteveH · Accepted solution]

This would be nice but I'm not sure how it would work. At the moment you can't see active minutes on the Blaze as they seem to calculated on the fitbit servers when you sync. This means that the Blaze would not be able to track them as it's primary goal unless it was continuously syncing.

What about using calorie burn as your goal? This would not be affected by your main activity not involving steps.

[42Wired]

They removed it "temporarily" about a year ago. Still waiting for them to restore that functionality... Calories aren't important to me, but my exercise level is.

[Nocturnx]

I agree, and Fitbit should also add challenges for calorie burn and active minutes instead of just steps.  Fitbit needs to embrace being a full blown activity tracking company instead of dwelling on it's pedometer roots.

[Rich_Laue]

A year ago every Fitbit model figured active minutes differently, as they stated this was moved to the server, back then it was considered a permanent move. The reason being is so that all trackers will use the same stats for active minutes calculations. This also includes that for any minute to be considered active it needs to be surrounded by 9 other minutes that have steps counted.

[42Wired]

I'm fine with that. That seems like a good move. But our trackers and accounts still have access to this statistic, so they can easily just allow us to use this statistic as our primary goal.

[SteveH]

But that's the point. As the active minutes are calculated on the server, the trackers don't have access to it apart from when they sync. If active minutes were the primary goal but you weren't regularly syncing then the tracker would have no idea of you were close to your target.

[Rich_Laue]

I'll rephrase what @SteveH stated. Your account has access to your data, your Fitbit tracker doesn't have read access to your accounts data. It does not have access to active minutes, but if it did it will only be updated during a sync