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Arkhelion
37 posts
Arkhelion
@arkhelion
Health, work, money, faith, relationships — connected. Your data, your device, your decision.
Katılım Mayıs 2026
5 Takip Edilen1 Takipçiler
@janbtc this is the realest take in the thread. the hardware was never really the question, it's that the software either tracks nothing useful or hides it behind another fee. people don't churn because the sensor is bad, they churn because the day to day gives them nothing
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I sold my Fitbit Air today, here is why:
1/ I got way too influenced by the “Whoop killer” posts/videos, the reality is that it’s an inferior device (yes, it’s way cheaper) and, most importantly, the Google Health app is confusing and sucks for the basic day-to-day experience - it doesn’t do the basics at all or not very well (I get it, some of it unlocks with additional $99 subscription but what’s the point of a fitness tracker when it literally just tracks your steps?!)
2/ The battery is an issue, I was on the road for 10 days and had to bring additional charger, Whoop lasts longer and it’s much more convenient (not a huge issue tbh but just not a huge fan)
Overall, I used to be a loud critic of @WHOOP in the past… but now after this experience I have to give them a lot more credit, these two devices are not comparable at all, they serve 2 completely different audiences
I’ll be renewing my Whoop subscription for now!
Jan@janbtc
Got the new Fitbit Air, for the next month I will be wearing it together with my Whoop For science obviously…
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@VinceJacX @WHOOP the no transfer thing is the part that gets me. you bought it, it's yours, and it still ends up as landfill because the months are locked to your account. that's the whole problem with renting access to your own device
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@hustlepotato the meaning problem line is exactly right. a red score with no context isn't insight, it's just a number telling you to feel bad. the value was never the data, it's what connects to what. this is the part i'm building toward too
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"More data = better life" was a lie we sold ourselves.
When was the last time you checked your WHOOP, saw a red recovery score and felt like YOU failed? Not your body. But YOU!
That's not health tech. It's a $30/month anxiety subscription from their oversimplification of data.
WHOOP's Recovery Score = You HRV + Resting Heart Rate + Sleep + Respiratory rate — and turn them into one traffic light. Green, yellow, red. No psychology. No emotions. No life context.
What the wearable industry is missing:
→ Meaning of data is the moat, not raw data.
→ Anxiety is not engagement but churn with delay.
We don't have a sensor problem. We have a meaning problem. It's time to build the missing piece.
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@rainbowjanelane if you mostly wear it to bed a ring might suit you way better than a watch, far less to notice. fitbit's hrv has a rough reputation for exactly this. what are you trying to learn from it, recovery or stress?
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Do any of you happen to use a SMALL wearable that measures HRV correctly? I have a small fitbit watch as I can't really stand wearing anything on my body, I only wear to bed and sometimes outside but I think this model is total shit at measuring HRV, my measurements are so off
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@mutant1879 you just said the reason i started building in this space. once the score is the product, it can't stay honest. mine only works if it has no incentive except showing you what's actually in your data
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@Sydnatash yeah i've got one. the subscription is the part that bugs most people, the core tracking still works without it, you just lose the daily scores. and there's a whole crowd building no subscription setups right now if you don't mind tinkering. what are you mainly wanting to track?
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@arkhelion Do you have one? Also thinking about the subscription. I know there’s alternatives with no subscription required
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@AIHealthExport this is the right half of the problem. getting the data out clean is what stops people being locked to one assistant. is the export fully on device or does the file pass through a server first?
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the big AI apps all want to be the place you ask your health questions.
fine.
I built AI Health Export for the other side of that: getting your Apple Health data out in a clean, usable file, so you are not locked into one assistant.
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@parthav_j the whoop section nails it. great sensors trapped behind a subscription and an app that feels stuck in 2020. the hardware was never the problem, the software and the pricing model are. solid breakdown
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spent a good saturday adding to this
added apple health fallback for sleep, recovery and vitals
working towards fixing live capture lag
open to suggestions on what could be the next steps on this
Parthav Joshi@parthav_j
a little late to the party but managed to get this running for my whoop a few issues with frame rates and packet loading, managed to get that fixed would love to talk with folks building something cool with this or on top of it with machine learning
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@gbrl_dick good enough for soldering iphones is the most honest sleep score readout i've ever seen. the cheap rings really are closer than they have any right to be
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@toeknee_kim app free live stream off a ring 4 is wild. the spo2 extraction is the one i'd love to see land. is it gated behind the same firmware thing the hr stream needs or a different wall entirely?
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got my laptop connected directly to my oura ring 4 now streaming live heart rate. time to see if i can extract SpO2
Tony Kim@toeknee_kim
set up a brand new oura ring 4 without the oura app ever touching it. my setup, live data, my code. (hr streaming might need a firmware update, stay tuned)
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@arkhelion Haha it’s mostly entertainment value. Maybe take a walk after a cortisol spike of a meeting.
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Thanks to the Oura ring I can already cross reference my daily stress changes against my calendar. It doesn’t like when I’m on calls with my divorced lady MD.
Pankaj@the2ndfloorguy
i hooked my whoop to my work calendar to find which coworker gives me the most stress 🚨 thanks to fable, I reverse engineered whoop to pull per minute heart rate. nd matched spikes with cal events and attendees I now have a leaderboard and I think about it daily. few info masked for obvious reasons ;)
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@vu3dtu that's roughly where i landed too. cross check the overlapping metrics, and when two trusted sources agree you keep it, when they drift you flag it instead of silently trusting one. the hard part is the derived stuff like calories where there's no ground truth to check against
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@arkhelion I haven't thought much about it yet - but it might be good to get confidence in the ring values (if it's close to the apple health data). If we have high confidence keep the data point, otherwise get rid of it. Do you have some ideas?
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I loved the idea behind the Google Fitbit Air: an LLM wrapped around your health data, daily briefs, and a coach you can ask questions.
But there app is really terrible, it's expensive $100 band plus $10/mo, and Google getting a constant stream of your heart rate, sleep, and other private data. Whoop is worse, with a subscription that runs up to $360 a year.
So I bought a $7 generic Chinese smart ring from Temu, reverse engineered its BLE protocol, and built an app around it.
Introducing PulseLoop: no subscription, open-source iOS app. Your health data stays on your phone, paired with an AI coach that reads your real ring data, draws charts, and remembers context. Free, bring your own API keys. Demo and code below.
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@MattMercurio exactly the wall i keep hitting. my answer so far is the user brings their own api key and every call that leaves the device is shown plainly before it happens. no background processing of the encrypted stuff, you decrypt in the moment, use it, done. not elegant but honest
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@arkhelion It gets tricky with LLM integration though. Users need to know if an action results in external calls with their decrypted data. Plus you can’t work on any of that at-rest data asynchronously anyway. A whole new world of challenges.
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Oura Ring suggests getting fired 2 days before your extended holiday can actually be beneficial to your soul. Consistently in the 90s since then. I was not in the right place and I needed this vacation.
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@MattMercurio that bar is where consumer apps should be headed honestly. if the data is personal the developer shouldn't be able to read it. goals, health or anything
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@arkhelion It’s a goals app - and I think if people put in legit goals they don’t need the developer (me) having a peep hole into their data.
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I have been wearing apple watch, fitbit air and the ring for last 2 weeks. There is not a lot of variance in the steps, heart rate (±5 bpm) and sleep (±10 minutes) surprisingly. Although a lot of second order derived metrics are harder to estimate like calories burnt. I have also been testing slightly more expensive rings $20-30 and it is even closer. I am also working on integrating with apple health, thay should also help the accuracy as it can get some data from your phone!
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@MattMercurio building it just to see if you could is a solid reason honestly. what made you go e2ee instead of just keeping everything local?
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@arkhelion I’ve been building something cross-platform with full E2EE. Just to see if I could make it happen. The privacy component is key. (A flavor of a Goals app)
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@fulldividends fully sealed off from the whole cat and mouse. honestly the cleanest position anyone's described
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@arkhelion no im fully disconnected from all future updates
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cancelled my whoop subscription today
works on pc perfectly
ios app soon
fulldividends@fulldividends
going to cancel the whoop soon and use my open source version with my whoop mg band no point in paying anymore
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@arkhelion After a few hours of being awake Oura shows you hour-by-hour stress levels so you can pretty accurately check the different spikes on the same day
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@MattMercurio fable is genuinely insane, it's been doing a lot of my heavy lifting already. mac first is deliberate though, the privacy core leans on apple's hardware. i'm thinking that cross platform comes after mac is great
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@arkhelion Crack open Fable and maybe be cross-platform in 4 hrs ;) It’s nuts.
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