Let Your Pebble Time Act as a Fitness Tracker – with PlexFit

Pebble Time with Michael – Day 22

Back on Day 18, in my “Monitor Your Pebble Time’s Battery Life – with Battery+” article, I mentioned that I would continue to have Battery+ running on my Pebble Time as long as I didn’t find a better application that also required the use of the Activity Tracker function. As you may recall, only one application at a time can use Activity Tracker to run in background and continuously monitor the Pebble Time’s sensors. Well I’ve finally removed Battery+. It has been booted off my Pebble Time in favor of PlexFit. This is an Android-only application that provides me with just what I want in the way of fitness tracking, along with providing automatic integration with the Google Fit application.

Way back on Day 3 I wrote an article entitled Let Pebble Time Count Your Steps – With Fitcat. In it, I mentioned that my personal fitness regimen is very simple – walking and strength training. The only thing I need a fitness application to do for me is to accurately count my steps and log them. Fitcat is a simple application that does just that, along with quite a few other quirky features mentioned in my review of that app.

Alas, although in my review I mentioned that the initial testing I performed with this application appeared to show pretty good accuracy in its step counting, shortly after publishing this article I came to realize that I was wrong. Fitcat regularly grossly under-counted my steps. Increasing the application’s sensitivity setting didn’t correct this, it just increased the number of “false steps” it registered during the course of a day.

So I began a journey to find another Pebble Time application that would accurately count my steps. I first tried Pedometer and Steps. Both of these programs had the same problem as FitCat – grossly under-counting my steps even after making adjustments to sensitivity settings. They also didn’t use Activity Tracker and thus didn’t constantly run in background. Then I stumbled upon the PlexFit app.

Surprisingly enough, my initial testing of PlexFit had it over-counting my steps. It was the only program I’ve found to do that. However, there are lots of settings available to tweak its operation and I was soon able to get it to count my steps with excellent accuracy. It accurately counted the steps I actually took and didn’t generate lots of false steps. Here are the application settings I found to work best for me:

Algorithm: Rhythm, Step Threshold: 5, Sensitivity Level: -4, Low-Pass Filter: Off

PlexFit records my steps and logs them into the companion Android PlexFit application. The companion app in turn loads its data into the Google Fit application for inclusion into that program’s logging and graphing functions. Everything seems to work extremely reliably and without any fuss. The only special action I’ve had to take was to shutdown and then turn my Pebble Time back on after initially installing PlexFit on it. The application did not register any steps until I did so. After that, it has been nothing but smooth sailing with the app and I’m extremely happy with it. It runs in background at all times, using the Pebble Time’s Activity Tracker function, and logs my walking activities all day long.

PlexFit also has a sleep tracking function, but after trying it for a couple of nights I didn’t see any real value to me of this information, so I disabled the function. If you want to track your own sleep each night, then you may find this to be a valuable feature of the app.

So, in summary, good bye to Battery+ and welcome to PlexFit on my Pebble Time! I’ve finally found a Pebble Time application that effectively replaces my old Fitbit activity tracker.