failure to sync

[enigmapaul]

I will be developing a system for monitoring participants in a clinical study, using Versa 4s. We plan to pull the data from the Fitbit web API to present to the study organizers via a web app.  There will be a mobile app for participants to log other non-Fitbit information.

In testing the Fitbit, I have found that sometimes syncing breaks on ios devices. I re-create this by turning off Bluetooth and turning it back on again.  That seems to (sometimes) render background syncing inoperative for an indefinite period. You can fix it by opening the Fitbit, and usually requires multiple attempts to re-establish syncing. In this case, the demographic of the study participants is older seniors (70+), and they won't necessarily be actively using the Fitbit app itself. They will just passively wear the fitbit device and have the Fitbit app setup on their phone by the study coordinators. 

The concern is providing support to the participants when and if the syncing fails.  The only workaround I can think of is to detect the lack of updates and send an email reminder to the participant with instructions to open the Fitbit app and manually sync.

But I thought I would ask if other developers have run across this problem and if you found other ways to mitigate it.

Thanks!

[Guy_]

Hi @enigmapaul - interesting issue, however already there is an ongoing problem with the latest firmware update to 194.61 and syncing is one of the issues.

The other is the behaviour of the Fitbit App on different telephones and their various setup and issues.

When a watch gets separated from the phone how, if, whether or how long it takes to reconnect depends largely on the phone and possibly time of separation [noticed or unnoticed].

This assumes it was setup to run in background. It is possible for other reasons that it doesn't reconnect, for example if it got connected to another device, or the phone gets confused and requires a reboot, or the watch too.

For Android phones you may be able to automate some daily recovery process using MacroDroid to ensure the operation is working as intended. It is quite powerful.