Calorie burn for walking and hill climbing - is it recorded in any way?

[mycophage]

I am an old FitBit One enthusiast who is trying to recreate the experience I had back in the day. I got a Versa 4 because it has an accelerometer for counting climb, and have taken it on a couple of walks.

It logs altitude changes pretty reproducibly, and it recognized and recorded my walks, but that doesn't seem to correlate in any way with caloric burn. In fact, my calorie burn is just flat - every hour gives the same number, whether I was flat on my back in bed or fast-walking up Bernal Hill. The amount of walking (steps) I do doesn't change the calories expended, nor does floors climbed. It's particularly irritating that it tells me that it recognized my walk and how many calories it thinks I burned, but doesn't add them to the calorie expenditure for that time period
=
(The calorie count does go up when I manually log exercise - e.g., yesterday I did a short workout on a rower and added it to the app, and that one time interval from yesterday has a higher calorie total.)

The whole value proposition of this device for me is that it will passively record my energy expenditure in a way that I can then compare to my caloric intake, also conveniently recorded in the same app. 

Is this operator error on my part, or is the calorie counter much, much stupider than on the old FitBit One? If I'm failing to understand something, please help me work it out.

[mycophage]

What's even weirder is that a FitBit Inspire, which I bought and was using before I realized it had no accelerometer, seemed to log the calories for walking correctly.

[JohnnyRow]

Although the Versa 4 does have an altimeter, a big difference is that it, and all watches since the introduction of heart rate monitoring, measure calorie burn by heart rate.  This takes into account the same factors because when you are working harder to climb uphill, your heart beats faster.
However, there is obviously a problem for you.  It seems it must not be reading your heart rate at all, perhaps except for the one time when you saw your calorie burn go up.

The flat calorie burn you are seeing is your BMR (Basal Metabolic Burn) which is the calories fitbit calculates you always use just to alive, breathing, heart pumping, etc without any activity.  These calories are always credited even when you are not wearing the tracker.  That was probably the same with the One. 

Now the question is: Are you seeing any heart rate readings on the Versa 4 at all?  If not, we have to figure out why, and then you should start to get reasonable calorie burn numbers.

P.S. I assume you are wearing it on your wrist as per the instructions so it can get a heart rate reading, not trying to wear it on waist similar to One setup, right?

P.P.S.
Just saw your last post about Inspire which must have gone up while I was formulating last answer.
It makes sense Inspire would give decent calorie count similar to One.  I believe it was one of the last trackers without heart rate monitor, replaced by the Inspire HR (heart rate).

[mycophage]

Thanks very much for the response. That's what it is - I've been wearing it as a clip because I already wear a watch and have zero interest in replacing my watch with a tracker, or wearing two watches. I didn't realize that the Versa doesn't use the step/floor data for calorie counting. 

Cr@p. It seems like there's no way to recreate the situation I once had — a tracker that could be worn as a clip that accurately measured altitude changes and used those data to compute calorie burn. From my reading and your response to this question, there's no FitBit device that can do that. Am I wrong about that?

Appreciate the info, all the same.

[JohnnyRow]

Actually yes, the Inspire 3 which is still being sold (many older models have been discontinued), is designed to be used either with or without heart rate tracking.  Fitbit makes an separately sold clip for wearing with heart rate turned off.  You would want to be sure to make that "clip" setting.  In fact, people often wear on wrist but  find they have it accidentally in "clip" setting so get no heart rate readings.  But it does not have an altimeter.  To tell the truth, I'm not sure that ever actually factored into calorie burn, even for the One.  That's an interesting question.  I'll ask that to a knowledgeable One enthusiast and see what she thinks.

I see that the Fitbit store does sell a clip for the Versa 4, although you cannot turn off the heart rate readings; that seems very strange - I don't see the point of that unless someone just wanted it for a pedometer - an expensive one.

And, if you were to get the Inspire 3, you could still decide to give it a try on your wrist sometime, just to take a look at all the other info that heart rate data can provide you if you ever got curious.

[mycophage]

Thanks again. I actually have the Inspire 3 - I bought it because it seemed One-like. I plan to return it because it lacks the accelerometer for measuring climb. 

I am a knowledgeable One enthusiast and I can confirm that it took altitude change into account for calorie burn. The difference in burn between flat routes and ones with lots of altitude change is night and day. The reason I'm so hung up on this is that I live in San Francisco, and hill walking is my primary form of exercise, and I really liked the way the One fit into that. Activity logging with the One, plus calorie intake logging on the FitBit app, really worked for me for weight loss.

I stopped using the device because the Bluetooth sync feature stopped working properly with the FitBit phone app, and the company stopped supporting the little dongle that allowed you to sync via the desktop. I wish I could just have it back. I really, really liked my One.

I agree that it's confusing that the company sells a clip for the Versa 4, given how limited its utility is when worn that way.

[JohnnyRow]

I wonder if you are confusing the terms accelerometer and altimeter.  I believe all fitbit devices have accelerometers to recognizes steps, altimeters to measure altitude.

[mycophage]

I'm definitely not confusing the two kinds of devices, although it turns out I was not fully correct about how a FitBit measures altitude changes.

FitBit devices like the Versa have a 3-axis accelerometer, so it can measure any change in the device's velocity vector, and the software can use those measurements to calculate how the user moves through space in all three dimensions. I know for sure that's how the One (which only had the accelerometer, no barometer or GPS) used to compute altitude changes, and I assumed that's how the Versa was doing it. But it's only part of the story.

An altimeter is a device that computes the altitude from barometric pressure; I didn't know FitBits have them, but some do. They also have geolocation, which could be used for altitude. (I'm sure JohnnyRow knows this but I'm spelling it all out on the off chance someone else ever reads this thread.) So there are notionally three ways to figure out relative altitude. 

According to MarreFitBit the FitBit Moderator on this page in the forums, the Versa uses both the accelerometer and the altimeter to compute floors climbed. And this makes sense: if it just used the altimeter, an escalator ride would look like a stair ascent. Conversely, there are probably certain kinds of arm movements that could cheese an accelerometer into thinking it was moving upward in the Z direction, and we'd want reality-checking from the altimeter.