Are active zone minutes the only minutes that count? If so, this is quite frustrating to me. After being diagnosed with congestive heart failure and getting on meds that bring my heart rate down, and being very out of shape currently, it is difficult to get my heart rate up. The more I exercise, the closer I am getting to my body be able to do that, but at this point, I just can’t get that many “active” minutes in. Also, this means that yoga and swimming are out as well.
If they are not the only ones that count, what might be my problem? I’m on a samsung 23 with a charge 6 fitbit. I logged in under “workout” and made sure I did the minimum bingo tile, but still got 0 minutes after doing bands on my shoulders and planks.
If they are the only ones that count, are there any plans to add tiles for minutes where your heart rate doesn’t get high enough?
Yes, the Active Minutes in Smash Bingo games equate to Active Zone Minutes when syncing data from Fitbit.
You may be able to customize your heart rate zones in the Fitbit app to trigger Active Zone Minutes to accrue at a lower heart rate, but otherwise we unfortunately don’t have an easy workaround for this issue today.
If you’re not necessarily tied to using your Fitbit in StepSmash you could try using Samsung Health. When we were integrating Samsung Health into StepSmash I didn’t purchase a watch, I just installed the Samsung Health app on my personal phone, and Samsung Health awarded me it’s version of Active Minutes just for walking around while my phone was in my pocket.
Otherwise we do have some work planned for early in the new year that will make it possible to swap the Active Minutes goal for something else when joining a Smash Bingo game, but we don’t have any more specific time frame yet on when that will be live.
I don’t believe that will work as the Fitbit app will read from Health Connect on your phone, but it doesn’t push that data back up to the cloud (which is where 3rd party integrations such as StepSmash are integrated). I’d love to be wrong though, so please let me know what happens!
The Samsung Health app itself seems to detect steps, distance, and active minutes so long as you have your phone on you while you move throughout the day. That might be a non-paid option until we’ve improved StepSmash in this area.