Fitbit now supports Google’s ‘Health Connect‘ system for pulling in and dishing out all your health data from various sources.
As spotted by 9to5Google, Fitbit ‘version 3.69’ enables support for Health Connect, but you wouldn’t know it from using the app. Instead, you need to head into Health Connect itself, which might be a tad challenging since it no longer appears in the app drawer (if you even have it installed).
If you don’t have Health Connect installed on your phone, head to the Play Store page to download it (note that it is still in beta). Once downloaded, you can launch it from the Play Store. If you already have it downloaded, you can open Health Connect through a quick settings tile or by heading to Settings > Apps > See all apps > Health Connect > Open app.
Within Health Connect, tap ‘App permissions’ to view a list of all the installed apps that can access the service. Fitbit should be listed if it’s up-to-date — tap it and select ‘Allow all’ to connect it with Health Connect. Alternatively, you can go through the various data and individually enable what you want in Health Connect.’
The data Fitbit can share to Health Connect includes:
- Distance
- Elevation gained
- Exercise
- Floors climbed
- Heart rate
- Sleep
- Steps
- Total calories burned
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, Fitbit only supports writing data to Health Connect, and doesn’t pull data from Health Connect. That means if you’re like me and have a connected health device from another company, there’s still no solution to merge that data into Fitbit. Hopefully now that Health Connect support is live, Fitbit will soon allow users to pull in health data from other sources.
Ultimately, this also means Health Connect doesn’t do a whole lot at the moment for Fitbit users unless they really want to sync their Fitbit data with Google Fit or other apps.
Beyond the Health Connect change, Fitbit version 3.69 doesn’t bring any other substantial changes, like the impending redesign. Meanwhile, Health Connect got a small update that adds a ‘Recent access’ timeline so users can see which apps access their health data, add to it, and how often they do so.
Source: 9to5Google
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