Change to Active Minutes calculation

[JeremiahFitbit]

Starting today, active minutes are getting smarter!

Active minutes give you credit for physical activity that’s more intense than just strolling around.  We’ve based the improved active minutes on the activity guidelines set by the Center for Disease Control, American Heart Association, and other organizations. You earn active minutes when you wear your Fitbit while walking briskly, running, doing cardio workouts, or doing any other moderate-intensity activity for at least 10 minutes at a time.

By default, you are given a starting goal of 30 active minutes a day. You can always change your active minutes goal to meet your personal needs.

Charge HR and Surge incorporate heart rate tracking and therefore can do an even better job at giving you credit for active minutes during activities that don’t involve taking steps! For trackers without heart-rate sensing, you can expect your active minute count to be lower for activities that are not primarily step based, such as weight lifting, yoga, or rowing.

Read more at Fitbit’s Help site.

For developers, the active minutes goal calculation is now a sum of veryActiveMinutes and fairlyActiveMinutes. Previously, only the veryActiveMinutes value was used. The API will not be changing any data points. However, if your app uses active minutes or the active minutes goal setting and you would like to be consistent with the Fitbit apps, you should use the sum of fairlyActiveMinutes and veryActiveMinutes.

[PositBGH]

This is a big problem becuase it ruins one's ability to compare to the past accurately.  What I would recommend is that you add a new statistic but keep the old counter as well - kind of like they way they brought back Coke Classic when they came out with New Coke!

I noticed that my steps went crazy today too - this is also disturbing.  When analyzing the statistics, the most important thing is to be able to look at trends and you just destroyed this feature - I am very dissappointed!

[Michael]

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@PositBGH wrote:

This is a big problem becuase it ruins one's ability to compare to the past accurately.   When analyzing the statistics, the most important thing is to be able to look at trends and you just destroyed this feature - I am very dissappointed!

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@PositBGH I think if you look back that all the historical data has been converted to the new calculation, so you should still be able to see trends. (You might just have to re-load old data.)

[JeremiahFitbit]

@PositBGH: As stated, the underlying data hasn't changed. If you have feedback about this feature, please use the other forums. This forum is for Web API support.

[Michael]

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@JeremiahFitbit wrote:

@PositBGH: As stated, the underlying data hasn't changed. If you have feedback about this feature, please use the other forums. This forum is for Web API support.

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@JeremiahFitbit I sure hope that isn't true, one of the problems has always been that the Flex/One/Zip calculated minutes using a different formula than the newer trackers. (And at that the Zip even used different than the Flex/One.) As such even if you combined veryActiveMinutes and fairlyActiveMinutes they weren't comparable between a One and Charge worn by the same person at the same time. This caused a big problem for people in their historical data when they switched from one tracker to another. With multi-tracker support now it is even more important that all Fitbits use the same formula for calculating active minutes.

[SumnerFitbit]

Now the formula for calculating Active Minutes is the same for all trackers.  This is one of the reasons for the change.  You still may see some differences between different trackers, but in general they should be awarding Active Minutes credit in a similar fashion.  

As stated one caveat is that trackers without heart rate sensing will not do a good job awarding Active Minutes for activities that don't involve steps.  Trackers with heart rate will award Active Minutes for those same activities.

[Michael]

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@Sumner wrote:

Now the formula for calculating Active Minutes is the same for all trackers.  This is one of the reasons for the change.  You still may see some differences between different trackers, but in general they should be awarding Active Minutes credit in a similar fashion.  

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@SumnerFitbit That is good news. Just to confirm, now that the formula is the same for all trackers was old data recalculated using the new formula so that it is all consistent and comparable?

[SumnerFitbit]

Old data was not changed.  We didn't want to alter past active minutes that were previously earned since although the metric differed across trackers, there was an expected way it worked for each.  It was important that we not take away previously earned Active Minutes.  We are in the process of communicating this change that applies to the metric going forward, including publishing an update to the help article, as we want to make sure we are explaining it clearly.

[Michael]

@SumnerFitbit Thanks for that I guess. At least we know now that we can't compare past data to current if we have, or had, an "older" tracker. Personally I think it would be better to alter the past activity so that you can track trends over your whole Fitbit life, instead of having a line in the sand, on 4/3/2015 or whenever you switched from an "old" tracker to a "new" tracker, that you can't compare minutes across.

[PositBGH]

You should have considered having a communications plan in place BEFORE making this change. And you should provide an additional dashboard view that shows the old unadulterated statistic!

[aarondcoleman]

Is there a specific API endpoint that exposes this new derived activity minute score or does it replace an existing field? Is it in here somewhere: https://wiki.fitbit.com/display/API/API-Get-Activities ?

Thanks,

--Aaron

[aarondcoleman]

Also, if it's not in there now, any chance that derived active minute value could be added in to the announnced update to Get Activies endpoint @JeremiahFitbit ? https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Web-API/Potentially-breaking-change-to-Get-Activities-endpoint/m-p/7...