Understanding How Your Data Is Processed

From your wearable to your results

When you connect a wearable, health app or fitness platform to Welly, your activity, sleep and heart data doesn't arrive in the app exactly as it left your device. Before you see it as steps, sleep, readiness or points, it passes through a series of checks that make sure it's accurate, consistent and comparable, no matter which wearable you use or how many you've connected.

Here's what happens behind the scenes, and why it sometimes explains what you see, or don't yet see, in the app.

1. Collecting your data

Once you've connected a wearable, app or health platform (see Connecting Wearables & Apps), Welly regularly checks in with each connected source to retrieve your latest activity, sleep and heart data. If you've connected more than one source, for example a wearable and Apple Health, Welly is often working with data from both at once.

2. Making it consistent

Different wearables record data in different ways. One device might report distance in miles, another in metres; one might log your activity in your local time zone, another in a different one entirely. Before anything else happens, Welly converts these into one consistent format, so a kilometre is always a kilometre and a Tuesday morning walk always lands on Tuesday morning, regardless of which device recorded it.

3. Applying a common standard

Every wearable brand has its own way of categorising things like sleep stages or heart rate zones. Welly maps these to one consistent standard, so "light sleep" means the same thing whether it came from a ring, a watch or a chest strap. This is what allows Welly to compare your data meaningfully over time, even if you switch wearables.

4. Cleaning up overlaps and duplicates

If you have more than one connected source recording the same thing, for example your phone and your watch both counting steps, Welly needs to decide what to show you. Generally, data straight from a wearable device is treated as more reliable than data estimated by a phone or health app, but for figures like step counts and calories burned, Welly will keep whichever connected source recorded the higher number, since undercounting your effort is more of a problem than overcounting it.

Welly also allows a short window for connected sources to finish sending data before it finalises a summary, so a source that hasn't quite finished syncing doesn't get left out or shown as incomplete.

5. Scaling everything the same way

Once your data is clean, Welly puts it on a consistent scale, aligning things like calories and activity intervals so a day's worth of data adds up properly and can be compared fairly against another day, another week, or another member.

6. Organising it into your results

Finally, your data is organised into the categories you actually see in the app: activity, sleep, readiness and heart health, so it's ready to show up as your points, streaks and readiness score.

Why some data arrives faster than other data

Because of the steps above, not all data types travel the same path, and that's usually the reason you'll notice some numbers update almost immediately while others take a little longer to catch up.

Take steps and distance from the same walk. Step counts are often captured continuously in the background by your phone or wearable, so they can be recorded and passed through to Welly in close to real time. Distance, on the other hand, is usually only calculated once a walk, run or workout is finished, and often depends on your wearable syncing that finished activity across before it can be processed. If your watch hasn't opened its app, connected to wifi, or finished a sync since your walk, your distance for that walk will lag behind your step count for the same period, even though both came from the same activity.

This is normal, and it's usually just a timing difference rather than something going wrong. If a number seems consistently missing or wrong rather than simply delayed, check that your wearable connection is still active.