The Potential of Health and Fitness Tracker Data: From Granularity to Unified APIs
- Written by: Thryve
- 9 minutes
The wearables market has skyrocketed— health and fitness trackers are now standard for monitoring daily steps, heart rate, sleep quality, and much more. But as digital health platforms, fitness apps, and insurers build smarter, more personalized user journeys, one question remains central: how granular is the data we’re working with?
More importantly, how can disparate and inconsistent health metrics, captured across dozens of devices, be harmonized into one reliable, usable source of truth?
In this article, we break down the typical data granularity across popular fitness trackers and explain how Thryve’s unified API, enrichment tools, and quality frameworks turn fragmented data into consistent, analytics-ready insights for developers, data teams, and digital health innovators.
What Is Data Granularity?
Data granularity refers to the level of detail or precision at which data is captured and presented. In the context of fitness tracking, this could range from high-resolution data, such as step counts captured every second, to lower-resolution summaries, like daily activity averages or hourly sleep overviews. Different devices and platforms offer varying levels of granularity, impacting how effectively the data can be used.
Examples include:
- Step counts collected every second versus once per minute
- Heart rate measured in real time versus averaged over five-minute intervals
- Sleep stages captured in 30-second epochs versus simplified into overall quality ratings
Why Granularity Matters?
Granularity affects the richness and reliability of insights derived from fitness data. High-granularity data enables:
- Real-time feedback and in-app coaching
- More precise detection of health trends or abnormalities
- Personalized and adaptive training programs
- Early-warning indicators in prevention programs
Conversely, inconsistent or low-resolution data can lead to:
- Missed correlations and underpowered analyses
- Inability to compare metrics across users or devices
- Limitations in personalization, affecting user experience and outcomes
Granularity also matters for interoperability. Without consistent formats or frequencies, data from different sources becomes difficult to harmonize—slowing down development and reducing analytic accuracy. This is why digital health platforms increasingly prioritize access to high-frequency, reliable, and standardized health data across all integrated devices.
Data Granularity Across Major Health and Fitness Platforms
Understanding how different platforms collect and structure data is essential for developers and organizations relying on fitness tracker integrations. Below is a breakdown of what granularity looks like across several leading ecosystems:
Google Fit
Google Fit’s History API supports per-second step data, which makes it useful for real-time tracking and micro-interval analysis. In addition to steps, the API offers granular activity segments (e.g., walking, running, cycling) and calorie estimates based on user activity and biometric profiles. The actual granularity may vary depending on the user’s device (e.g., Pixel Watch versus generic WearOS device) and whether the necessary permissions have been granted in the app layer. Furthermore, some lower-end devices may only support batched uploads or averaged summaries. It’s also important to note that Google Fit is being phased out and replaced by Health Connect as the new standard for Android-based health data integration. For a full breakdown of what this means for developers and Thryve customers, see our blog post.
Fitbit
Fitbit devices generally offer per-minute resolution for heart rate and activity metrics, suitable for most wellness and lifestyle applications. For researchers or clinical use cases, higher-frequency data such as sub-minute HRV (Heart Rate Variability) and raw accelerometer streams can be accessed—but only through Fitbit’s Research Access program, which requires formal approval. Sleep tracking is relatively advanced across Fitbit models, with data provided in 30-second epochs, classifying sleep into light, deep, and REM phases. This offers reliable sleep architecture reconstruction over time.
HRV and Other Advanced Metrics
Devices like Garmin, WHOOP, and Oura provide HRV measurements at 1-minute intervals, especially during nighttime or dedicated recovery windows. These readings are critical for stress analysis, recovery readiness, and training load calibration.
Other available metrics include:
- Skin temperature: Logged continuously or as overnight averages.
- Electrodermal Activity (EDA): Available in some devices for real-time stress tracking.
- Blood Oxygen Saturation (SpO2): Captured periodically during rest or sleep, depending on device settings.
While these metrics exist across brands, the sampling methods, sensor sensitivity, and upload behaviors can vary significantly, requiring normalization and context-aware interpretation.
By understanding the data cadence and structure of each platform, product teams and developers can better plan how to structure downstream analytics, set user expectations, and design interventions or nudges based on timely and actionable signals.
The Challenge: Fragmented Epochs and Proprietary Metrics
Even when metrics appear consistent at face value, such as “heart rate,” “calories burned,” or “steps,” the reality under the hood is quite different. These metrics are often encoded using proprietary data models, structured with unique timestamp formats, and sampled at inconsistent intervals. This lack of uniformity introduces considerable complexity when aggregating or comparing data across multiple devices or platforms.
For example:
- One device may calculate resting heart rate as a daily average based on nighttime data, while another may use a rolling 5-minute minimum throughout the day.
- Step data from Android Health Connect may include gaps during background processing, creating temporal holes in the dataset, whereas Apple HealthKit might interpolate missing periods, potentially skewing the true count.
- Sleep scoring across wearables may involve different classification logic, with some applying proprietary machine learning models and others relying on fixed thresholds or movement sensors.
This lack of standardization leads to several challenges:
- Cross-device analysis is unreliable without normalization, as trends and thresholds mean different things across vendors.
- Research and clinical insights may be compromised, as comparing sleep efficiency or HRV baselines across users with different devices becomes methodologically flawed.
- User experience is affected when the same metric behaves differently depending on the device, reducing trust in the data and undermining engagement.
To support scalable, fair, and clinically meaningful health applications, it is critical to implement normalization strategies that decode and align this fragmented data landscape. Without these efforts, even the most advanced features and insights risk being built on shaky foundations.
Enhancing Data Through Enrichment and Reliability Checks
Raw sensor data is only as valuable as its accuracy, consistency, and usability. To help developers and data teams work with clean and interpretable data, Thryve has built a multi-layered enrichment pipeline that focuses on transforming raw signals into robust and reliable insights. Here’s how:
- Quality Flags: Thryve automatically identifies and flags data that might be unreliable due to factors like missing readings, sensor dropout, poor device wear (e.g., loose watch strap), or motion artifacts. These flags help downstream systems decide which data to trust, ignore, or treat with caution.
- Interpolation and Smoothing: Short-term gaps in sensor data can occur due to syncing delays, battery-saving modes, or temporary disconnections. Thryve applies smart algorithms to fill these micro-gaps while preserving physiological accuracy. For example, heart rate sequences may be smoothed using validated signal reconstruction models that avoid artificially inflating trends.
- Anomaly Detection: Beyond simple error checking, Thryve detects outliers or implausible readings that could signal sensor malfunctions, user non-compliance, or unusual conditions (e.g., spikes in body temperature due to device overheating versus true fever onset). This layer ensures that what reaches analytics dashboards or medical professionals reflects actual user physiology—not data noise.
Together, these enrichment methods ensure the data that flows through Thryve’s ecosystem is clean, complete, and credible—reducing the risk of false conclusions and increasing the integrity of all downstream insights, whether used in coaching, research, or preventive care applications.
Unified Data Distribution: Stream or Batch
Depending on integration goals, platforms can access Thryve data via:
- Batch Exports: Ideal for historical analyses, research, or ML training
- Webhook-Driven Streaming: Real-time data triggers for app notifications, training cues, or insurance logic
And with schema versioning, any new data fields or device types added to the ecosystem remain backward-compatible.
Use Cases for Granular, Unified Data
- Digital Health & Coaching Apps
Fitness apps rely on real-time data to deliver timely nudges, training adaptations, and progress feedback. Thryve simplifies multi-device integration—streamlining authentication, normalizing metrics, and powering features like adaptive workouts, HR-based intensity targeting, and dynamic recovery scoring.
- Clinical Prevention Programs
Population health initiatives often involve participants using different wearable brands. Thryve enables unified access to HRV, sleep, and temperature data, so providers can build longitudinal insights, stratify risk, and tailor interventions—regardless of what device the patient owns.
- Insurer Health Incentive Platforms
Insurers are increasingly leveraging real-world health data to inform behavior-based rewards. Granular metrics via Thryve allow insurers to track improvements over time, trigger early interventions for deteriorating health patterns, and drive ongoing engagement with wellness offerings.
How Thryve Harmonizes and Analyzes Fitness Tracker Data
Fitness trackers are collecting more granular, more personal health data than ever before—but that data is only valuable if it’s harmonized, enriched, and made actionable. Thryve offers the infrastructure and intelligence to unify fragmented fitness tracker data across hundreds of devices, enabling digital health solutions to scale faster, build better analytics, and create more meaningful user journeys. Here’s how Thryve enables your platform to do more with less:
- Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect Oura Ring and over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform via a single API, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
- Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
- GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements.
- Customizable Dashboards and Alerts: Create tailored dashboards for healthcare providers and patients to visualize pregnancy-related trends, receive real-time alerts for abnormal patterns, and track recovery and readiness metrics post-delivery.
Whether you’re building a digital wellness app, launching a prevention program, or enhancing a payer platform, Thryve equips you to deliver scalable, high-impact experiences backed by reliable data.
Want to unlock high-quality, unified health data from wearables?
Book a demo today to see how Thryve can support your data strategy.
