HRM

[Philip144]

Is there a Heart Rate Monitor out there that has bluetooth and will feed my fitbit datafile?  It would be helpful if Fitbit were to provide such a device or to amend the software to allow such a feed from other manufacturer's devices.

[Algenon]

This discussion has a bunch of different heart rate monitors and their uses:

 https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Get-Fit/Heart-Rate-Monitors-and-Fitbit/m-p/2395/highlight/true#M126

I personally do not know much about them but the person who started the thread, Colinm39, is very knowledgable and polite.

[slysam]

Hi Phillip, I use a bluetooth Polar H7 heart rate monitor strap. There are a lot of phone apps this hrm strap can work with, I use it with Digifit Icardio. I have my Digifit and fitbit ccounts linked so my workouts are automatically logged to Fitbit. The activity type, start time, duration and HRM calorie burn are logged here. for GPS tracked distance activities the distance is also logged here. The heart rate monitor data is not, but fitbit doesn't have a specific place to associate heart rate with a workout anyway (there is a place to log heart rate but it isn't linked to a specific activity). I look at the digifit website for the detailed heart rate data--more detailed than I get from my Polar HRM watch including minute by minute heart rate, time in each of 5 zones, heart rate at different points on the GPS map, etc. Digifit also does a nice job of pulling some of the fitbit activity data onto the digifit website. I am not sure which phones the H7 and digifit are compatible with. I have an iphone 4s and I think that may be the oldest iphone either would work with.

[Dominique]

Yes, there are several Bluetooth-based HRM's out there (you'd want a Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, device, provided you have a compatible smartphone, eg. a recent iPhone or Android). No, there isn't any easy way to have the HR data fed to your Fitbit account. The problem is that your Fitbit account isn't really designed to accommodate HR data in a useful way. You would therefore be better off using a third-party app like Runtastic, Digifit etc. to pair with your HRM and store your HR data on a per activity basis.