CDC Active Minutes

[CDCActiveMinute]

The API only shares sedentary, lightly active, fairly active, and very active minutes. Which of these correspond to activities at or above 3 METs as defined by the CDC? Fairly and very? We only want to pull active minutes. Can you expose active minutes in the API?

[JohnFitbit]

Hi @CDCActiveMinute,

Welcome to the forums!

Using the GET Daily Activity Summary endpoint, you can retrieve a user's summary of their activities for a given day,

GET https://api.fitbit.com/1/user/[user-id]/activities/date/[date].jso

Example response:

{
    "activities":[
        {
            "activityId":51007,
            "activityParentId":90019,
            "calories":230,
            "description":"7mph",
            "distance":2.04,
            "duration":1097053,
            "hasStartTime":true,
            "isFavorite":true,
            "logId":1154701,
            "name":"Treadmill, 0% Incline",
            "startTime":"00:25",
            "steps":3783
        }
    ],
    "goals":{
        "caloriesOut":2826,
        "distance":8.05,
        "floors":150,
        "steps":10000
     },
    "summary":{
        "activityCalories":230,
        "caloriesBMR":1913,
        "caloriesOut":2143,
        "distances":[
            {"activity":"tracker", "distance":1.32},
            {"activity":"loggedActivities", "distance":0},
            {"activity":"total","distance":1.32},
            {"activity":"veryActive", "distance":0.51},
            {"activity":"moderatelyActive", "distance":0.51},
            {"activity":"lightlyActive", "distance":0.51},
            {"activity":"sedentaryActive", "distance":0.51},
            {"activity":"Treadmill, 0% Incline", "distance":3.28}
        ],
        "elevation":48.77,
        "fairlyActiveMinutes":0,
        "floors":16,
        "lightlyActiveMinutes":0,
        "marginalCalories":200,
        "sedentaryMinutes":1166,
        "steps":0,
        "veryActiveMinutes":0
    }
}

Additionally, if you want to extract only one of the values (lightlyActiveMinutes, fairlyActiveMinutes, veryActiveMinutes), you can use the GET Activity Time Series endpoint and set the resource path to one of the following:

activities/minutesLightlyActive
activities/minutesFairlyActive
activities/minutesVeryActive

As for the exact values of how we define METs, please refer to this thread as another user had asked a similar question (https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Web-API-Development/About-the-METS-range-of-activities/m-p/3790959#M...).

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any additional questions!