Is there a way to collect heart rate and step data continuously in the background?

The use case is simply that I want to record the data that’s already collected at more regular intervals than Garmin aggregates! Regularly connecting the watch via USB would be pretty user-unfriendly, of course, but if occasionally doing this to download a data file is the only way, it’s something I’d be willing to consider for personal use.

It would obviously be far better if these data were available via APIs, so if anyone can point me in the right direction I’d be most grateful.

I’m not sure exactly how Garmin calculates RHR, but the state on their website that it’s collected during the final phase of sleep. It’s precisely to allow calculating this myself and thus sidestep differences between manufacturer’s algorithms that I’d like access to the data!

And yes, agreed the issue is that system FIT data may be transient. If an app ran every five minutes perhaps it could save it and would only miss the occasional five-minute interval where sync occurred, but it’s clearly not an ideal solution, even if the relevant FIT files do exist somewhere.

There are some people on the forum that don't even have GCM and they intentionally don't sync with Garmin, instead they download and process/store the data themselves / using other websites. But I don't know what part of the data they use. I mean, the activities is not a big deal, as that's the part you can access for sure via the apis, as other websites like strava do.

Yes, it seems pretty easy to access the activity data at high resolution via Garmin Connect or the FIT files directly on the device. It’s the 24/7 recording I was hoping to find a way to improve the time resolution of. :)

Dear 4141607,

Have you found a way?