Very Active Calories

[dstarh]

We can get the very active minutes via the api but there doesn't seem to be a way to get the calories burned for just those minutes.  

Is there something I'm missing that will give them to me or are there mets defined for the "very active" minutes?  

We know the very active distance and very active time so we could calculate the average speed and use that to look up the mets and then the calories but we were hoping that something in the API would give them to us.  We want to offset our users caloric allotment by only very active activities using the tracker.

[Colinm39]

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@dstarh wrote:

We can get the very active minutes via the api but there doesn't seem to be a way to get the calories burned for just those minutes.  

Is there something I'm missing that will give them to me or are there mets defined for the "very active" minutes?  

We know the very active distance and very active time so we could calculate the average speed and use that to look up the mets and then the calories but we were hoping that something in the API would give them to us.  We want to offset our users caloric allotment by only very active activities using the tracker.

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@dstarh Before Fitbit changed their definition of Active Minutes the calorie ranges were

Active Minutes 3.0 to 5.9 mets/minute

Very Active Minutes 6.0 mets/minute and greater

Hope this helps

[dstarh]

Hrm, that's kind of backwards from what I need.  I want to be able to calcualte the calories burned via Very Active Minutes.  The API doesn't distinguish between the calorie types so we need to calculate them ourselves.  

We know that there were N very active minutes during the given period, we just need to know more details on them to determine either what the mets are and we would use that to calc the calories or get the calories themselves from the api (if they were available)

[Colinm39]

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@dstarh wrote:

Hrm, that's kind of backwards from what I need.  I want to be able to calcualte the calories burned via Very Active Minutes.  The API doesn't distinguish between the calorie types so we need to calculate them ourselves.  

We know that there were N very active minutes during the given period, we just need to know more details on them to determine either what the mets are and we would use that to calc the calories or get the calories themselves from the api (if they were available)

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@dstarh Because the data isn't available via api, all I do is create an Activity Log and analyse the one minute graphs as you can see in the example.  A pain doing it this way, but when I walk I know what my calories/minute should be to achieve VAM I aim for that even though over the time lapsed it will have it's ups and downs.

[dstarh]

I understand the data isn't direclty available via the API, I'd like to know

• Why isn't it available via the API, anyone from Fitbit want to weigh in?
• If it's not ever goign to be available via the api is it safe to assume that 60/(VeryActiveDistance/VeryActiveMinutes) would give you the average very active speed.  Given that speed can I then corelate that to known mets for a given walking/running speed?  
• Is there some better way to know the calories used during VeryActiveMinutes?

[dstarh]

I should note that any analyzation we'll be doing will be programetically