Millions of people are logging fitness workouts with wearables. Now a growing number of them are trying to free their data from their devices.
Fitbit / Via fitbit.com
Kendra Albert has painstakingly logged a few million steps on wearable fitness trackers over the last four years. But the only proof of her hard-won progress resides on the servers of the company that makes them. For Albert, that data is almost as valuable and irreplaceable as photos or texts, and she worries what would happen if someday it were to become prohibitively expensive, or technically impossible, to export. "Getting locked into a specific provider would be unfortunate," the 25-year-old law student told BuzzFeed News.
As more people monitor every part of their health with gadgets and apps, a debate is emerging over a key question: Who owns the resulting data? A small but growing number of consumers, who've literally sweated for that information, say device makers should give them the tools to export, analyze, and delete the data as they please. But some of the leading fitness-tracking services haven't done much to make it easy to download data or integrate it into other systems — partly because they don't think most customers want to view their steps in massive Excel spreadsheets, and partly in a bid to keep them from taking their steps to a rival.
So over the last few years, a handful of programmers have built their own data-scraping tools for fitness apps. They're members of the Quantified Self movement, which uses self-tracking technologies to improve well-being, and part of a broader campaign to free our health data from institutions that have been historically slow to share it, be it for reasons technical, legal, or financial.
"The Quantified Self movement is fighting the same battles that patient advocates are," said Regina Holliday, a patient advocate in Grantsville, Maryland. Holliday believes her late husband, who died from kidney cancer in 2009, might have received better care if he'd had full access to his medical records.
"The idea is that all the data needs to be shared and needs to be able to follow the patient and be used in conjunction with each other," she said.
Last June, Apple released Health, an iPhone app that's a dashboard for steps, calories, weight, sleep, and other metrics. You can manually enter data or import it from devices and apps. If you want to take that information off your phone, the app's built-in export feature generates a file like this:
Stephanie M. Lee / BuzzFeed
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