Energy Burn from Pedometer Data

With the release of HealthVault 0901 (late January 2009), applications that access data uploaded from Omron 720ITC pedometers are no longer able to retrieve a value for calories burned during exercise.

Applications that use the Exercise data type (the replacement for the AerobicSession type in the 0901 release) are impacted by an issue with the Omron driver, where the driver uses the incorrect detail type (Work_kj rather than CaloriesBurned_calories) to report calories burned. When an updated driver is available, this value will be available in CaloriesBurned_calories. Since users will not be automatically updated to the new driver, this issue may continue for some time. Applications can work around this problem by falling back to Work_kj if there is no value for CaloriesBurned_calories. NOTE: Applications will also need to handle the resulting unit mismatch (since Work is expressed in kj, and CaloriesBurned is expressed in calories).

Applications that use the AerobicSession data type are impacted by a different problem. As described in the blog post on using the Exercise type the Energy property in AerobicSession had an ambiguous definition. HealthVault cannot deterministically down-version a calories value from Exercise to AerobicSession since the Exercise class has two different details for calories and work done, whereas AerobicSession has only one. The fix is to upgrade to the new Exercise type, with the caveat that calories may not be available in CaloriesBurned_calories until an Omron driver update is released.

We will update this blog post when the new Omron driver is released.

EDIT (18 Feb 09): The updated driver has been released! When you uninstall your old driver and install the new one you should see that it is version 1.5.0.0.