Hi,
How do I put this? Although there have been many years of "fitness" advice about hydration, there are actually no medical studies that show a relationship between maintaining hydration with tracking or goals like "eight glasses of water idea for health" and actual health. It's all just made up advice and and trendy hype. About the only need for such a goal would be if you have a health problem, e.g. kidney stones, where extra hydration can be important to prevent formation of stones.
I can understand that some people may find it helpful if they have trouble being aware of thirst signals from their bodies, but otherwise it is just a feel-good thing: something easy to do that makes you feel like you are doing something beneficial to your health.
Surely there could have been much more helpful fitness measures. Especially since the Connect app is promoting it as one of only three measures (activity, weight, hydration) on the main app page.
A helpful stat, that would have direct impact on one's health, would be to track your diet (not "dieting" but things that you eat). For example, I think it would be great to have a tracker for the number of servings of vegetables that you eat per day. Another beneficial thing to track would be the number of zero-nutrition snacks that you eat per day (e.g. chips, crackers, cake, candy, etc).
This could actually be combined into one tracker. You would get +1 point for every serving of vegetables, and -1 point for every serving of snack. Then one could set a goal for so many positive points per day. Or at least just seeing a graphic would help a lot and you could go for just raising the curve as the days go by.
Mark