Step data in 1-min inervals

[Carole]

Hi! I'm not a developer, but I thought I'd ask my question here in
case anyone can help.

I'm a researcher using the Fitibts to record the activity levels of
elementary school children during recess. A student found a way to
gather the data from what is currently available online through the
fitbit website. We can extract steps and activity level in 5-min
intervals into excel. Once we put in a sleep period, we can also
gather activity levels in 1-min intervals. What we're trying to get
now is step data in 1-min intervals. It seems like those data should
be available, but they aren't on the graphs and thus we can't gather
them using the current program we have. Has anyone figured out a way
to do this? Any help would be greatly appreciated! I can be
contacted at vanc...@uncw.edu. Thank you!

Carole Van Camp

[Kyle Machulis]

Hi! I'm currently working on developing an open source library for getting the data off fitbit devices (http://www.github.com/qdot/libfitbit). I can actually get the 1-minute step counts through my library at the moment. However, there's a bit of an issue in terms of base stations. A fitbit tracker (the part you wear) will talk to ANY base station, and if the computer the base station is hooked up to has the fitbit client, it will instantly upload it to the website and wipe the device, at which point you can only get the 5 minute device off their website. 

So, there's two ways to make sure you get one minute steps:

- If this is a study where you control all of the base stations for the fitbits, and can stop the official fitbit client from running, we might be able to build a special program to bring down the data straight to the computer without having to upload it to the website, which means you get the 1-minute data

- If the base station needs to be on a machine where the fitbit client has to run, but you at least have access to that machine, we can still get the 1 minute data due to the fact that the fitbit client verbosely logs all transactions. Since we know the data format coming off the device now, we can find the portions in the logs where the 1 minute data is sent to the server, and pull the data out.

Both of these solutions would require some custom code to be written, but it's at least a possibility.