Fitness Trackers Don’t Have To Be Proprietary

Fitness trackers have become a popular piece of consumer electronic equipment, with a range of models from a variety of manufacturers. Many of these commercial offerings, however, leave the consumer with the prospect of their data being drawn off to a cloud server and sold to the highest bidder, trading convenience for a loss of privacy. If only there were a fitness tracker offering complete control!

The OpenHAK is an open-source fitness tracker in a 3D printed wristwatch case that measures your heart rate and counts your steps, offering the resultant data for you to collect via Bluetooth. At its heart is a Sparkfun Simblee module, with heart rate sensing through a Maxim MAX30101 and step counting .by a Bocsh BMI160. It’s designed for expandability from the start with a header bringing out useful interface lines. In the prototype, they’ve used this to support a small OLED display. The result is a fitness tracker watch that may not match some of the well-known proprietary devices, but which remains completely open and probably costs a lot less too.

We’ve seen quite a few fitness tracker apps over the years, including a conversion to an EEG, and custom firmware for some commercial trackers.

6 thoughts on “Fitness Trackers Don’t Have To Be Proprietary

  1. Nice to see more Open Source Projects on fitness tracker devices, as mentioned in the article i already published a custom firmware for the I6HRC Fitness tracker, since then things have changed, thanks to fanoush (https://github.com/fanoush/ds-d6) who has found the 5$ D6 fitness Tracker from desay with the nRF52832 core i was Able to also make a arduino custom firmware for this tracker and make an Android app to update the Tracker without opening via DFU here are some video’s about that:

    Android Flasher for nRF52 devices:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDGxU-i7z7U

    Heartrate Sensor demo:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQsxk_iKhg8

    Custom notification app for Android:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODRWm9IqufA

    Thankfully fanoush made Espruino running on the Device, so directly programming via the Browser and upload via BLE.

  2. Would be nice to have this in a box preassembled. I really don’t like giving away my training methods, or locations, but would like to keep track of my heartrate and oxygen levels.

    1. Simblee is EOL.

      (Speaking as an ex-ams app support eng. It was just an nRF51822 repackaged into an LGA. Most code should port across to a standard chip – Anything written with the Simblee core for Arduino should compile for a generic nRF target with little trouble.)

  3. Since you’re a professional writer on a commercial platform, you might not know that proof-reading helps prevent publishing errors such as “step counting .by a Bocsh BMI160” (even the Firefox spell-checker catches one).

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