Updating Steps: Summary vs Intraday Records
- Matt Dougherty
- Clare Ellis
This article pertains to: Inform (v2)
If you are capturing your user's steps throughout the day, you want to make sure you are properly updating your records with the correct values depending on what type of data you use.
Summary
This is the most common way that step data is captured. For a given day, a user has a single Summary record that is updated throughout the day as the user is active. This includes their daily steps.
When that record is updated, the record ID stays the same throughout the day, but the checksum is updated to let you know that you are seeing an update to an existing record. This is documented here: https://helpdocs.validic.com/docs/managing-updates-to-records
The steps values that you will see in each updated record are the new absolute total as of that time and should NOT be added to any step values you have already captured.
For example, at 10:00am you capture a Summary record for a user that shows 2000 steps so you store that. Then, at 11:00am you get an update to that same Summary record that shows 3000 steps. The value of 3000 is your new total for the day for this user and should replace the 2000 you have already stored. You would not add the 3000 to 2000 to end up with 5000 steps.
Intraday, or High-Frequency Data, works a bit differently...
Intraday
If your org is enabled to get Intraday or High-Frequency data (https://helpdocs.validic.com/docs/high-frequency-data ) you will be calling the Intraday endpoint to see this. With this you will still see updates throughout the day with new step values.
For Intraday steps, you DO add them to your previous values.
You will notice in the documentation noted above that the steps are the "count of steps accumulated over X minute(s)."
For example, Fitbit provides the count of steps from a minute of time. So at 10:00am you could see a step value of 25. Then at 10:01am there could be a step value of 20. If these are the only steps you have received for this user for the day, this user's daily steps (even though it's just for 2 minutes) is now 45.