Saksham

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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In awe of SpaceX and its story - past, present and the future. You can think about it in 10+ different ways and continue re-blowing your mind in circles. Huge congrats to the team! 🚀

@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?

@vu3dtu the cheap rings closing the gap that fast is wild. the apple health piece is the interesting part to me, how are you planning to handle it when the sources disagree?

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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True to some extent. It's also harder to do step counting from rings as a lot of fine finger movement can be confused with steps. HR estimation is using PPG sensors that changes in absorption of light as result of blood flow, quality of the sensor and the algorithm to detect peaks in the signal can affect the estimates. I have a lot of academic work on PPG :)

@vu3dtu @zangariPower Steps and resting HR converge because they're basically counting. Calorie burn is a modeled guess, every wearable is off 15 to 30 percent. Garmin's the least bad with a VO2 max estimate, but treat it as a trend, not a number.

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!

@vu3dtu respect, this is the right answer to the whole subscription thing. how's the data quality off the $7 ring though? that always seemed like the catch with the cheap ones

@0xNeoArch Yes, I would love all the help. Not sure about the version. The sellers don’t really have any standardised naming patterns. But adding support shouldn’t be hard, protocol should be pretty much the same.

@vu3dtu very cool! i want to help with testing. will the Pro version of the ring work, too?

@Timothy98537991 Go for it! Feel free to make PRs with android port.

@vu3dtu I wonder if it would be possible to use your sources as a specification and have AI generate an Android app?

@TedRozycki I am working on it, it’s not as easy to reverse engineer the data protocol of fitbit.

@vu3dtu Why don’t you want to use the original Google Fitbit Air, which has much better sensors and build quality compared to the Chinese device, and then use the same approach to perform reverse engineering so you can communicate with it directly?

@SorinAmzu aliexpress.us/item/325681046…

@vu3dtu Link to ring please?

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. And, yes I am working on apple health integration!

@vu3dtu I feel like with $7 ring it would probably be garbage in garbage out situation, due to hardware limitations. But, likely, pairing with Garmin or Apple Watch would allow for best of both worlds: good data and no expensive subscription.

I have been wearing apple watch, fitbit air and the ring for last 2 weeks. There is not a lot of variance in the step, heart rate and sleep 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 they are even better.

@vu3dtu The only problem is the accuracy of the sensors.

@netrunner_btc I agree, they have some good derived metrics. If there were to be a big open source project we can write algos for these derived metrics. There is a lot of academic research around this.

@vu3dtu i agree their app sucks but i think they probably have a team of 10 at most working on it, im switching back to whoop because of it. the problem with these open source versions is the data processing, and unfortunately everyone is working on their own on this

Yeah for sure, they have a lot of derived metrics and there measurements will also be more accurate (better sensors, more data). But I like to think of this as "pièce de résistance", you have absolute control over your data, and you pay for what you use albeit at the cost of accuracy.

@vu3dtu While I'd love to have something that cheap but to me the data matters. Google and Whoop both have their own algos and the way raw data is interpreted is what matters. And that's why I'm waiting for fitbit launch in here. Comment on that?

Google probably has 200 engineers working on that, and the main page of the app is just LLM LLM LLM LLM. It makes a lot of mistakes and for me it stops measuring some vitals and steps from time to time. I made this app alone! There is a lot of room for improvement, help me make it better! But fundamentally you keep your own data and don't pay for any subscriptions.

@vu3dtu the interesting part is that you say the Google health app is terrible then ship that…

@synopsi makes sense!

@vu3dtu 1) you can turn that off in paid 2) you can run different models/local ones 3) I don't particularly care My point was more that it's working and validating what you are saying. I was quite surprised how well it's working.

This is the new version hand of god!

@aayush_mantry I am working on adding data import/export from apple health!

@vu3dtu How do I link my apple health and strava data to it

@theknightqueen I am working on trying to reverse engineer Fitbit data, will get back to you soon!

@vu3dtu But how to pull data from fitbit air in this ?

@chunky_bear_ @blinkenlicht It's not just about the money, they own all your personal health data! Just wait until they start selling it to insurance companies!

@blinkenlicht @vu3dtu Lol $0.20 cents per day