Fitbit Research Projects

[Sean_PD]

I'm from a small medical research company interested in using fitbit to help in our research projects, and have a couple of questions involving using multiple fitbits to track multiple patients.

We plan on handing out a couple dozen devices to patients to use over a short time frame (2-3 weeks) and then collect the devices and gather the data at the end of a study. These devices may be given to different patients in different studies at a later date.

However we do not know if the current fitbit services support the use of the product in this manner.

The main questions we have are:

1. Can we issue devices without the subject having to create an account.
2. Can / Do we need to create an account for each patient or is there a way to use one account for this.
3. Can we easily track which devices belong to which accounts.

Any Information would be appreciated.

[MakMak]

Here's my suggestion. A Fitbit is linked to an account. You must have an account for each tracker. So, you can either have your patients create an account and link the Fitbit to it. This will give you unique data for this patient. Or, you can give them access to an existing accout by providing them an email address and password and use one account for each tracker. This would be easier in terms of not having to add and delete a tracker from an account every time you switched patients, but the data could become muddled, since you would be getting cumulative data on the account from multiple patients.

As for tracking which device is which, you could label them or color code the wristbands. If you're creating the accounts and using one acount per tracker, or even one per patient, you could come up with a code to use with the email addresses that links to the label on the tracker.