Mulitple devices connected to a single companion app - possible?

[lupianobus]

Hello everyone, 

I am helping a friend with a fitness studio to integrate HRM monitor into their group classes workout. The final idea would be to have a number of users each wearing a FitBit watch (e.g. Versa), and synchronizing their heart rate monitor to our backend / displaying it on a big screen in a semi-realtime fashion.

From my understanding of the Fitbit architecture, the flow would be something like : 

- fitbit device collects Heart Rate data -> Fitbit device sends data to app companion -> Fitbit companion can send data to our backend

My question is, is it possible to have multiple devices (e.g. 10) connected to one single app companion?

The idea is that all the devices in the Gym will be connected to a single app, so then i can centralize the process of sending the HRM data to our backend.

Thank you in advance for your answers and sorry if this is a noon question 🙂 

[Gondwana]

@lupianobusThat's a very reasonable question. Unfortunately the answer is 'no'. The Fitbit app can only accept one Fitbit OS watch at a time. Therefore, each watch would need a separate companion device (eg, phone). Each of those phones could onforward the relevant data to the same server.

[lupianobus]

Hey hey,

Thank you for taking the time to answer 🙂 if I may add a follow up question , do I need a separate FitBit account for each phone , or could I login with the same account on multiple phones and each phone paired to a different watch?

Thank you again !

[Gondwana]

I'm assuming you're wanting to stream HR data from multiple watches more-or-less simultaneously.

I should probably correct my previous response. The Fitbit app can actually handle multiple Fitbit OS watches. However, it can only be logged in to one account at any point in time, and only one Fitbit OS watch can be associated with an account.

I think you're going to need multiple phones, with each phone running the Fitbit app logged in to a different account, with each account associated with a different watch.

If it were possible to change the account that the Fitbit app was using automatically and quickly, that might have helped. But I don't think that's possible.

There's a theoretical chance that different instances of the Fitbit app could used on one phone if the phone itself has multiple accounts (eg, logins for different people). However, I suspect that apps associated with non-logged-in users would be suspended. Keeping companion code running on a single instance is already challenging.