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Why Not a FitBit Charge HR?

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grayson-schlichtingGrayson Schlichting 07/11/2016 at 06:481 Comment

I have one of these, and wear it 24/7. It sends out a constant "greenish" pulse of light from 2 LEDs to accomplish its measurements.

There are two problems:

1) The FitBit unit itself averages your heart rate in its normal operating mode. You can press and hold the button on the side to go into "Workout Mode" and it will read (and log) continuous heart rate measurements.

2) FitBit uses Bluetooth BLE to send its telemetry, but it is encrypted and proprietary. The only way to get this data is after it has made a trip through BLE to your computer or SmartPhone (with the FitBit App) and then is transmitted to the FitBit "cloud."

This is not ideal, because there is a time delay, and API calls out to the Internet must be made to get (then parse) this information.

See https://dev.fitbit.com/docs/heart-rate/

Discussions

francebaciu wrote 06/11/2022 at 18:37 point

You didn't mention that it comes from Google and that a hack got patched (6 years go) that allowed us to upload firmware to the tracker. It won't work anymore :( and there's nothing else currently that we can do against it. You can just delete the Fitbit app of course.

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