When writing activities (exercises) to Health Connect, Fitbit does not write the calories burned as active calories burned records. Instead, it writes it into total calories burned, and in 15 minute chunks. This makes reading exercises recorded by Fitbit from Health Connect a bit troublesome.
Here's an example to further explain what I mean:
- Ensure Health Connect is connected and that all permissions are granted.
- Manually log an activity (e.g., “Run”) starting at 10:00 and lasting for 60 minutes (until 11:00). Write the value “600” into the kilocalories burned field.
- Save the activity.
- Perform a sync to ensure that the data is written to Health Connect. (I'm not sure if this is required, but I've at least done this myself.)
- Open the Health Connect app, go to Data and access and open the Total calories burned records.
- Navigate to the start time of the recorded Run activity from earlier.
- Find that there are 4 individual records of calories burned, at the times 10:00 to 10:15, 10:15 to 10:30, 10:30 to 10:45, and 10:45 to 11:00. In my testing, these records were 149 kcal each, which doesn't even add up to 600 kcal in total.
This is problematic for a few reasons, the main one being that the records are all on the :00, :15, :30 and :45 minute marks. This means that if you start a workout at 10:01, the calories burned between 10:00 to 10:15 would not be included in the data set from Health Connect. Similarly, if you end the workout at 10:59, we will not get the 10:45 to 11:00 record.
I believe that what Fitbit should record here is Active calories burned, starting at the activity's start time, and ending at the Run activity's end time.
