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Does fitbit not know how to take an average? Why are the averages on multiple graphs broken?

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‎07-24-2019 08:06

‎07-24-2019 08:06

I noticed a while ago that when Fitbit displays the average number of active minutes in a week (on my iPhone app), it ignores any days with zero active minutes. So if my active minutes per day were (95,0,0,0,0,0,5), it would display the average as 100/2=50 active minutes per day, instead of 100/7=14 active minutes per day. Does anyone else find that bizarre? I would maybe understand ignoring zeros on the step graph, since a day with zero steps is likely to be a day you weren't wearing your fitbit. But it makes no sense to me to ignore zeros in active minutes.

More recently I noticed that the resting heart rate average displayed on the top of the resting heart rate graph is also broken, even though there are no zeros. For example, the displayed resting heart rate for May says 66 bpm but when I average up the resting heart rate displayed on each day I get an average of 66.97. Are they just always rounding down for some reason?

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4 REPLIES 4

‎07-24-2019 08:38

‎07-24-2019 08:38

The rounding down thing is institutional/legacy for Fitbit - it was also done for daily mileage in the now defunct community group leaderboards, totals only summed the integer part of each days mileage, could get quite far behind on the monthly number, and anyone walking less than one mile would get zero credit. Unfortunate that basic mathematical QA and common sense are still not followed. 

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‎07-25-2019 04:48

In response to checking

‎07-25-2019 04:48

Why would they only sum the integer parts? That's bizarre.

Any insight on the first point I mentioned, about dropping zeros when averaging active minutes? What's that about?

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‎02-04-2020 13:49

‎02-04-2020 13:49

This seems really important if you're trying to improve your activity data and are looking at these monthly averages that don't include completely sedentary days! I could work out for 100 minutes on one day in March and that would look better than working out 80 minutes every day in February in the bar chart. This is crazy.

 

I sent a support ticket about this, assuming it was clearly a bug, and they said to post here. Hopefully will get more votes.

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‎02-05-2020 01:41

In response to saurusteri

‎02-05-2020 01:41

It's bizarre, but given the lack of comments on this thread, apparently no one cares that fitbit programmers can't take an average properly. It still drives me crazy.

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