fitbit-one-travel

I’ve been using Fitbit One since mid-April 2014. During the 4 months of usage, so far I have never missed my daily target of steps except for few days with long flight. When I was preparing for my trip to Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm last week, I had a little concern on how Fitbit will deal with the significant time difference between Melbourne (Australia) and those Scandinavian cities.

First, allow me to remind you that it is very very important to carry the charging cable. Fitbit One has a very unique charging cable and it’s the only cable capable of putting the juice into our health tracker. Second, after using Fitbit for few months, I started to treat it as part of my clothing and I almost forgot to remove it when going through airport security. Trust me, you will need to remove the tracker from your body to avoid unnecessary problem. Just put it inside your (hand-carry) bag at the airport and it will count our steps just fine.

Next, time difference. Generally, if our overseas travel only involve 1 or 2 hours time difference, I would say just leave Fitbit in our home timezone. However, my last trip to Scandinavia involved 8 hours time difference (Melbourne is GMT+10 and Stockholm is GMT+2) and I think it’s important to figure out how Fitbit actually handle the time change.

One thing I quickly realized during my departure trip was the fact that changing iPhone’s time zone (which subsequently adjust my phone’s time) did NOT change my Fitbit’s time. To change Fitbit’s time, I need to open Safari in my iPhone, login to Fitbit’s web interface, go to Settings, change the time zone setting there and then open Fitbit app in iPhone again to do a sync. Too many steps, but it’s worth my experiment.

My travel from Melbourne to Stockholm involved two transits. The first one in Singapore, then in Dubai. I decided to adjust my Fitbit time every-time I reached an airport. Singapore is 2 hours behind Melbourne, so my Fitbit behaved that I had the chance to “add” more steps in my last 2 hours. It still had records on my steps before the time change (which was not much considering I was in a plane), then it added my “new” steps from Changi airport. Dubai is 4 hours behind Singapore, so I repeated the step and got another chance to “add” steps from 4 hours ago. Stockholm is 2 hours behind Dubai. Copenhagen and Oslo has the same time zone as Stockholm, so I don’t have time difference issue.

I used my Fitbit normally in Scandinavia and it recorded my activities as “local” time there. I checked my “previous days” records from Fitbit app and my activities in Melbourne were still recorded on Melbourne’s time zone. Seems good so far.

In my return journey, my flight only had one transit in Dubai near midnight. I adjusted my Fitbit’s time zone there few minutes after midnight. Stockholm’s time was still few minutes after 10pm but Dubai’s time was a bit over midnight. I had around 7500 steps before time change. When I changed Fitbit’s time, the 7500 steps from the “previous day” stayed in the record of previous day, but the “new day” started with 7500 steps already recorded. So my 7500 steps are now registered 2 times in 2 different days. Apparently, Fitbit device does its reset when the device reaches midnight. In my case, the device was still 10 pm then suddenly adjusted to 12:08 am so it didn’t do any midnight reset. This tells me further that steps log in the tracker is recorded with time stamp instead of date-time stamp. Or maybe it records our steps using a time stamp until it reaches midnight, then it adds date to the steps log.

Anyway, so if you travel to a place with significant ahead time zone, remember to somehow allow your Fitbit to have its midnight reset first. Otherwise you will have your steps recorded in both days (before and after).