Active calories and Apple Watch independence

[anko_123]

For people who track their activity levels with the Apple Watch:

Is there a way to have steps recorded by the iPhone contribute to active calories in Apple Health? For example, you wear an old school watch when walking to the shops and then later put on the Apple Watch when going to the gym.

With a Fitbit tracker there is the 'mobileTrack' feature which you means you can walk around without your Fitbit tracker and the phone steps will help calculate total calories on the Fitbit database. In practice this means you can wear a nice regular watch when walking around the shops etc or catch up with friends and then when you exercise properly you put on the Fitbit tracker and the software will reconcile the two sources of information.

I experimented with a random pedometer app in the app store that contributed active calories to Apple Health when walking but I found the Apple Health was doubling up on the active calories from the watch and from the pedometer app.

For me this is by far the biggest negative anti-feature of the Apple Watch.

 

[NoBoMac]

Are you sure you're actually seeing double calories being calculated vs seeing calories recorded twice?

If recorded, that is working as designed, and the data sources section order prioritizes what takes precedence in the calculation when there are overlapping times/dates. In this case, if pedometer is higher ranked in data sources, its value will be used in the calculation and not Health/iPhone values. Same situation happens when Watch and iPhone are being used at same time.

Can change precedence by tapping the Edit button under a category's data sources and then drag them how you want them. Watch, app, then Health to get most accurate calculation is probably the way to go.

Detailed here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204351

 

[anko_123]

Yes, they were being double counted. For example:
170 active calories on watch
70 active calorie contribution from stepsApp
240 active calories total in Health.

The reason was that the pedometer app contribution time was from midnight to present time (e.g. 00:01 to 12:34; if current time is 12:34), rather than smaller time period contributions.

Maybe I should try another app. I am sure this is deliberate to make you wear the watch all the time though, otherwise from a user point of view it should be automatically setup for anyone who purchases an iPhone and and a Apple Watch.

It kind of make the active calorie calculation useless unless you are prepared to dedicate your every waking hour to wearing the Watch.