Collect HRV, stress and body battery data without syncing with Garmin Connect

Hello,

quick question: is it possible to get HRV, stress and body battery in an android app on a smartphone from the Forerunner 55 without having to sync with Garmin Connect ?

scenario:

I've developed an app for Android that uses HRV, stress and body battery to send health advices.

At the moment, my android app receives data from an external service that collects the data from REST API's on Garmin cloud.

The problem is that after some minutes, the garmin connect app on the smartphone stops syncing in the background (due to android battery saving limitations, even if disabled) and data are not uploaded to the cloud until Garmin Connect comes back to the foreground.

As a workaround, I'm using an intent to periodically launch garmin connect from my app, but this causes a bad user experience,

I'd like to find a way to get sensor data without relying on garmin connect sync service.

So far, I've found out that this may be possible by developing a custom IQ app for the Forerunner 55 , but I'd like to get advice on the best architecture to adopt.

The possible solutions that I've found are:

1 - create a background service for the Garmin device that collects sensors data and periodically sends them to a remote web service, then I'll fetch the ws from my android app

2 - create an app for the Garmin device that responds to my android app polling and returns sensors history, but how will I poll the Garmin device? Can iI connect via BLE directly or is there any other protocol?

I will appreciate suggestions.

Thank you

Kind regards

0 flocsy🤠 4 months ago

IMHO 2. won't work exactly because of the same problem GC is killed after a few minutes.

1. this could work for body battery and stress. Background can run once in every 5 minutes.

I don't think you can do it for the HRV. There's no such API. Basically the stress data you get is based on the HRV I think, at least partially. You could collect HRV in real time but you'll need to run an app for that all the time, so not sure it's something you or the users will want to do. And probably your watch's battery won't hold very long.

0 9593221 4 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

Hello, thank you for your reply.

To be precise, I don't need to get the live data. For the app's purpose, getting getting the sensor history every one minute would be enough, but 5 minutes may be a too large interval.

My app does not suffer the same problem as Garmin Connect being suspended because we have found a way to keep it awake, so if someone confirms that 2 is a viable method, I will do more research in that direction.

0 flocsy🤠 3 months ago in reply to 9593221

Why can't you do the same to Garmin Connect app?

It looks you're looking for something not very suitable to do with CIQ. Probably with the Garmin Health api : developer.garmin.com/.../

0 9593221 3 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

We can't do the same as with our app because the trick we have found requires a modification to the source code of the app, that should respond to android system events to be awakened.

I'm afraid that the Garmin Health API depends on syncing data with Garmin Connect, that would take me to the starting point.

Instead, I've seen that a Health SDK is available that might fulfil our needs, but it requires a license fee. I'll try to contact the commercials to get a quote, but it would be nice if we could achieve a similar result without having to be committed to a subscription.

0 flocsy🤠 3 months ago in reply to 9593221

it might be cheaper to buy a new phone :)

0 9593221 3 months ago in reply to flocsy🤠

It would be a great solution, but the problem with Garmin connect does not depend on the hardware, it's an Android issue.

0 _psx_ 3 months ago in reply to 9593221

In my Samsung I put GCM and other important application and service to group of application without any restriction and there is no problem with synchronization.

0 9593221 3 months ago in reply to _psx_

Hello, thank you. We know that some Samsung models have less restrictive battery saving settings, but we have tested the app on several other device models and the problem occurs on too many models to make it acceptable for production.

We can't be bound to a few specific phone models.

0 _psx_ 3 months ago in reply to 9593221

Most of communication stuffs go through gcm so you will have problem if it doesn't work.

Maybe solution is installing ant+ services on phone and trying communicating with it directly.

0 flocsy🤠 3 months ago in reply to _psx_

True about gcm but I don't know any phone that supports ant. You can try Bluetooth, but then you'll have other, probably bigger problems.