Hi HN, we are Kyriakos and Raouf, founders of Terra (https://tryterra.co). We make it easy for health and fitness apps to safely and easily access data from wearable devices.
If you have a health app, there are so many wearables and sensors to connect to. Worse, every company has different tech (web-sockets, HTTP etc) and different data formats, even for the same kinds of data. Creating so many integrations with APIs, SDKs etc is resource draining, then you have to normalise data, and of course constantly do updates. And the documentation in this space is really bad.
I got hooked on wearables 10 years ago while serving in the Special Forces, when I needed to perform at my best, under the worst conditions. I wanted to use the old Polar HRM (heart rate monitor) to improve my performance. The data I was getting was so insightful, I started buying every wearable that came out over the coming years: Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Apple - you name it. I then became a fitness geek, and started learning more about nutrition, physiology etc. While discussing one day with my soon-to-be cofounder, who was also a gold medalist swimmer, we were asking ourselves - why can we not connect our data with an app like Spotify? Couldn’t song recommendations be better if they used your heart rate? Or Netflix movie recommendations, and so on? That's how it started.
We built an API, and a widget. Once you start speaking to our API, you can enable your users to connect Garmin, Fitbit, Oura, Peloton, Zwift, Withings, Training Peaks, Suunto, Apple, Polar and Wahoo to you. Then, you receive normalised data in your callback url whenever it is available. If you prefer, you can install our widget in your front end (https://docs.tryterra.co/widget), and it enables users to connect their wearables, without you building any additional layers.
Regarding the backend: We establish a PUSH connection with you, and whenever the data is generated, we send it to the callback url. It can be sleep data, activity data, body composition, and others (you can check the docs https://docs.tryterra.co). On your end, all you see is websockets. On our end, we deal with the providers' standards.
Our customers built apps that improve your sleep, VR apps that offer gym experiences, even apps that generate music based on your heart rate. There are health dashboards that show your health data from different providers, apps that pay you to train, apps that use wearable data to improve training recovery, and apps that help corporations provide offerings for employees to work out.
We charge based on API usage, and we never store any of the health information that passes through. We’re both HIPAA and GDPR compliant. If you want to try it out, you can sign up here https://tryterra.co, receive keys, and access both the widget and the API.
Thanks a lot for reading this! Would love to hear your ideas on what you’d like to see from the API, and some interesting app ideas that can be built by using Terra !
This is a great idea, and a welcome addition to the space. Fitness data standards are exceptionally poor and there's very little alignment between the major data collectors. This has resulted in the creation of a small army of syncing apps, developed to move data around between the most popular platforms, but as far as I know no ones attempted anything like this.
Having spent nearly a decade trying to extract data from the various walled gardens in the fitness space, I think something like this has really only been possible in the last few years as some of those walls have come down just a bit. That said, there are still some enormous hurdles to overcome. From the documentation it's not clear how OAuth is implemented. The authentication standards for many of these platforms are very diverse and often unfriendly in terms of the API agreements, rate limits, and various OAuth standards.
I'm assuming since it would be a violation of most API terms to pass data to a 3rd party, that the consumer of Terra must first acquire their own API key and then Terra uses that on their behalf? Although, if that's the case, OAuth implementations must be very tricky, especially for APIs like Garmin's which uses OAuth1a.
Nevertheless this can only be good news for the cause of open data. If it's successful, hopefully it'll create some pressure for these companies to expand their capabilities and relax their terms of service.
Thanks for this - there is indeed a serious complexity in this space.
a) there is no standard in data structure, and hence every wearable company uses their own.
b) The documentation quality is really lacking.
c) most of those companies are updating very often, with little communication. hence if you are a developer in this space, you really struggle.
d) more and more wearables are coming to the market
Hence we solve the above with robust docs, a standard data model, and a widget, to make it super easy. We of course are constantly learning, and improve the fastest way possible
I've been in the health tech space for a while and my main questions are:
- how's Terra's proposition different from Human API? (they started exactly the same as you do)
- are you compliant with any regulations related to storing/processing health records (i.e. HIPAA, etc.)? Asking as couldn't find anything mentioned about it on the website.
Some day my Oura ring and my Apple watch will naturally integrate what they measure about my health and activity with my Strava, Headspace and maybe even electronic health records. Looking forward to seeing how you think about the integration of consumer wellness and clinical medical data into one seamless experience.
I don't look forward to private health insurance getting their hands on that data. Regulators certainly won't allow it anyway - European regulators at least.
I've tried to get into this stuff, but I've found it completely useless for making any sort of impact on my day-to-day. I could see it being useful for athletes looking to hit their peak, but as a dude that just wants to bike and ski for fun, I get all of the information I need by just asking: "How am I feeling and what contributed to this".
The metrics are all just noise. That basically come down to:
* Have I been eating well?
* What have I consumed that's "terrible" for me (drinking, unhealthy food, etc)?
I think that there are a lot of ways to actually use the information. See the example of Eight Sleep : They use your sleep data to actually improve your sleep. Or Myfitnesspal: Connect your wearable to know exactly how many calories you need after training, and so on!
Absolutely. Your Oura and Apple watch, plus all other wearables are measuring data on a dynamic way, rather than the static we had all the previous years. Thus the insights are a much better indicator of your health, than what it used to be. From our customers we already see a strong development in the consumer wellness space !
This is the dream, but outside of government intervention I don't think it will ever be realized. There's no effective standards body, and the big players have little interest in sharing their data in any robust way. There's so many devils in the details of these specifications.
I'm not a web health app developer, I'm a wearable developer: I name "Open Smartwatch GPS" [1] (currently in development).
There's not a lot of data yet, but how could I (or, more importantly, future users of Open Smartwatch, or future users of phone and apps that would want to serve health and movement data) connect to your service? Can an end user upload/push raw data as JSON, CSV, or as MQTT messages, and access it from an arbitrary health app that uses your service?
> On our end, we deal with the providers' standards.
Ha! Wearable hardware "standards". Good joke! Do you integrate with GPSBabel [2] on the backend? But a commendable effort; there's a lot of wonky hardware out there, so thanks for unifying the multitude of providers.
There is a whoop strap logo on the homepage but nothing listed under integrations?
I stopped paying the monthly fee for whoop (which also big gripe just let me buy the device) because I didn't think their app did a good responding/recording data (nor super accurate, especially in reaction time for HR). Though maybe it's just the watch's underlying data.
Either way getting data out of whoop would be awesome.
This looks really interesting, nice! As a heads up your home page doesn't mention Apple Health at all and if I hadn't seen your comment here first I'd have assumed it wasn't supported and been a lot less interested.
At a very high level, how do I get data from a device to you? Does that require eg. an iOS app specific to my service?
Awesome idea! Our startup would be very interested in working with you, as our goal is only to provide data through our wearables. Would like to leave everything else to 3rd parties (like your company).
What's your business model? Couldn't find on your website.
EDIT: now I see that you charge per requests. Consider building "pricing" subpage.
Hey that's awesome! We have a monthly subscription, or a pay as you go, depending on your needs! If you can sign up on the page, we can schedule a brief call and get you onboarded! It takes only 5 minutes :)
Technically the onboarding takes 5 minutes - since we work with webhooks, and we just need a callback url from you ! You receive a PUSH whenever an activity is generated.
Terra is facilitating data interoperability within fitness, wellness and health. Cheers to this great team that will enable a healthier future centered around personalization!
This is great! I used to maintain connections to all kinds of social media APIs; lots of on going maintenance. neat to see a service dedicated to this. What are the SLAs like?
Thanks so much! Amongst others, maintaining APIs while they constantly update is difficult, and hence why we work on this ! Also you get more and more wearables coming to the market
oh yes! some developers are building online dashboards to do that already with terra :) i'll be honest though, I am really looking forward to replacing my garmin app to a better dashboard :)
Well we are all gym goers in Terra, and we all use wearables :) The more wearables evolve, the better we understand our health, and hence the better fitness app recommendations become !
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Edit: Apologies if this comes across as a bit blunt. Your project looks really interesting and clearly has huge potential. Its just that personal data and how it gets used is increasingly important.
Absolutely - thanks for the question so i'll clarify here:
On one side, you have wearables, and on the other you have apps.
We are the API that enables the user to connect their wearable data to the apps.
Meaning that when the user gives their consent, the API facilitates the connection with the app. At the same time, we never see the data, and we don't store them.
With the user's consent, they give access to the app, and hence the app as long as they agree with the wearable supplier regulations and terms of use, they get access to the information. Each of the wearable supplier (eg Garmin, Fitbit etc) have their own rules, and all the apps need to comply with them!
Hope this is not off-topic but I just want to say that Kyriakos (the OP) is a great guy. He gave up some of his time earlier this week to help me and my co-founder prep for our YC interview.
We didn't know him before this so I can only conclude it was a genuinely kind act from someone looking to give back to the community.
Terra allows for engineers to be creative. Their offering reduces technical debt as well as time to market when feature sets are of concern. Even if you're not active or have a personal utility for biometric data, it's undeniable there is an enormous amount of siloed data that ought to be normalized and managed. Great project here.
If you have a health app, there are so many wearables and sensors to connect to. Worse, every company has different tech (web-sockets, HTTP etc) and different data formats, even for the same kinds of data. Creating so many integrations with APIs, SDKs etc is resource draining, then you have to normalise data, and of course constantly do updates. And the documentation in this space is really bad.
I got hooked on wearables 10 years ago while serving in the Special Forces, when I needed to perform at my best, under the worst conditions. I wanted to use the old Polar HRM (heart rate monitor) to improve my performance. The data I was getting was so insightful, I started buying every wearable that came out over the coming years: Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Apple - you name it. I then became a fitness geek, and started learning more about nutrition, physiology etc. While discussing one day with my soon-to-be cofounder, who was also a gold medalist swimmer, we were asking ourselves - why can we not connect our data with an app like Spotify? Couldn’t song recommendations be better if they used your heart rate? Or Netflix movie recommendations, and so on? That's how it started.
Regarding the backend: We establish a PUSH connection with you, and whenever the data is generated, we send it to the callback url. It can be sleep data, activity data, body composition, and others (you can check the docs https://docs.tryterra.co). On your end, all you see is websockets. On our end, we deal with the providers' standards.Our customers built apps that improve your sleep, VR apps that offer gym experiences, even apps that generate music based on your heart rate. There are health dashboards that show your health data from different providers, apps that pay you to train, apps that use wearable data to improve training recovery, and apps that help corporations provide offerings for employees to work out.
We charge based on API usage, and we never store any of the health information that passes through. We’re both HIPAA and GDPR compliant. If you want to try it out, you can sign up here https://tryterra.co, receive keys, and access both the widget and the API.
Thanks a lot for reading this! Would love to hear your ideas on what you’d like to see from the API, and some interesting app ideas that can be built by using Terra !