Your steps: sources, goal and streak

The principle

Counting your steps is the simplest way to track your activity outside training. Several sources may report them on the same day — the Health app, a watch, the phone's sensor — and they never quite agree. Azetta chooses one value per day according to simple rules, and never fills a missing day with an estimate.

The Azetta method

The sources

• Health (Health Connect on Android, Apple Health on iPhone), synced at most every 10 minutes, rereading the last 2 days (30 days on the first sync).
• The phone's step sensor, read at most every 5 seconds.
• Your manual entry, up to 200,000 steps per day.

For a given day, your entry wins over everything; otherwise, the app keeps the highest value from the different sources, which most often counts steps the others missed.

The phone's sensor

The sensor gives a total counter since the last restart. The app adds the difference between two readings, with safeguards:

• the first reading only serves as a starting point;
• two readings more than a day apart, or a clock turned back, add nothing;
• a lower counter means the phone has restarted: the new value counts as the day's steps;
• a difference of zero or greater than 100,000 is ignored;
• nothing is invented for days without a reading.

Goal, averages and streak

• Default goal: 8000 steps, adjustable from 1000 to 50,000.
• Averages (over 1 to 7 full weeks, Monday to Sunday, 4 by default) count only days that have a value.
• The streak is the number of days in a row at goal, up to today — or up to yesterday if today's goal hasn't been reached yet.

Why this choice

• Keeping the highest value avoids losing steps when a source isn't carried all day, like the phone or the watch.
• Inventing nothing for a missing day keeps averages honest.
• Large cohort studies link a higher step count with a lower risk of mortality, with a benefit that levels off at around 6000 to 10,000 steps depending on age: 8000 is a realistic default goal.

Limits

• Steps are not converted into distance or calories: your everyday expenditure is covered by the everyday-life factor of the calorie goal.
• If the phone is switched off or forgotten, the steps from that time are missing.
• Two sources that each count part of the day are not added together.

References

1. Paluch AE, Bajpai S, Bassett DR, et al. Daily steps and all-cause mortality: a meta-analysis of 15 international cohorts. Lancet Public Health, 2022;7(3):e219-e228.
2. Tudor-Locke C, Craig CL, Brown WJ, et al. How many steps/day are enough? For adults. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2011;8:79.