Just to describe more of my personal “Internet of my Things” project as a proof-of-concept that the Fitbit is a great telemetry device and its data could be analysed in the cloud. The scenario that I am trying to build to create a great user experience for my users is described below:
Goal: To allow Fitbit users to see good visualization such as a power
map of where and when their activities occurred.
– Motivation: Let users find out where and when certain activities
occurred. This is especially useful for remembering which activities were pleasurable so much that it recorded the most steps. Then repeat those activities. While the Fitbit device does not record the latitude, longitude data, I could do a mashup of data recorded from an app like Strava by accessing its API.
Workflow is something along the lines of:
- Create a message pump that retrieves a stream of data points from 2 API source; Fitbit and Strava.
- Fetch intraday data points up to 1 minute detail for the activities collection. Currently this is not possible yet because I’m still waiting for access to this part of the Fitbit Partner API to be granted. Meanwhile I am using a workaround by Andrew Wilkinson’s python-fitbit library. Update: I had since gotten my Fitbit Partner API access and I’d been ingesting thousands of data points. Small data getting bigger.
- Fetch a stream of latitude, longitude, time and distance data from Strava API.
- Message pump sends data points to a cloud-scale telemetry ingestion hub.
- Use Office 365’s new PowerQuery and PowerMap to merge the data streams from Fitbit activities time series data and Strava activities stream to create a visualization like a map to show where the activities occurred.
- Publish this on social media to encourage more friends to join in the activities.