Comments on: fitbit – a source of personal data

By: My New Year’s Resolutions for 2012 « dale lane

My New Year’s Resolutions for 2012 « dale lane — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 01:11:59 +0000

[...] I used face detection as a form of sentiment analysis to measure my reaction to TV viewing, I mashed up my fitbit personal activity data with stuff like sentiment analysis of my tweets, and I wrote an app that monitored my daily happiness. Better [...]

By: dale

dale — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:03:49 +0000

Thanks very much. I hadn’t seen that stuff about the passwords sent in the clear, that was a little disappointing though

By: Jerry Webb

Jerry Webb — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 05:22:21 +0000

Great article, convinced me to buy one for fun Dale. However, the device seems to fall down on the security side of things, sending its data with your fitbit serial number and password to the fitbit servers in plain text … http://www.openyou.org/2011/04/18/fitbit-and-security-or-lack-thereof/ has more. This could be a snag with it, plus the implication that it could be a handy stepping stone to cracking other accounts that you have linked it to once fitbit open up more access to other apps on their website.

By: Roger

Roger — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:16:51 +0000

Very interesting. I’m tempted to get one but they’re a bit pricier than I’d like. On the other hand, you’ve shown that they’re very good value in terms of cost per graph…

By: Has today been a good day? « dale lane

Has today been a good day? « dale lane — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:44:15 +0000

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By: dale

dale — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:55:00 +0000

I didn’t write a lot of code to be honest.

I didn’t need to go for anything as complex as libfitbit, as I’m not actually grabbing anything from the fitbit device itself.

Instead, I’m using the REST APIs
(https://wiki.fitbit.com/display/API/Fitbit+Resource+Access+API) to get the data from the website. The REST APIs return reasonably straightforward blobs of JSON or XML – the trickiest bit of it is doing the OAuth stuff, but there are client libraries (I went with Java) to make that easier.

I just wanted to play with the data, so I took the lazy approach – for each of the REST APIs, I grabbed everything I could and wrote it to a local CSV file. Then imported those into OpenOffice and manually made the graphs. I only have a month’s worth of data, so that is simple enough for playing around with ideas.

At some point, I do want to do a proper fitbit hack, though.

By: Andy Piper

Andy Piper — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:57:48 +0000

I assume you’re using libfitbit? have you published the code on github or anywhere? I’ve been meaning to MQTT-enable my fitbit (albeit on a batch basis, since it doesn’t sync unless it is near the base station) so I’m interested.

Looking forward to the new Fitbit scale they are releasing, too.

Incidentally, you might want to join the openyou Google Group as well.