Getting your Fitbit Data

I do not know why I was put off getting my Fitbit data through the official channels for so long. Something about OAuth2.0 seemed intimidating. But it's really not. It's just filling out a web form. This is a really good walk through of the process.

Just fill in all the fields here they insist you do, making sure to select 'Personal', and for my purposes at least, 'Read-Only'. Once created you'll see it listed on your apps page. If you follow the link from there to the OAuth 2.0 tutorial page it populates all the fields. You click on the link they tell you to, copy the long parameter list from the url, throw it into the Parse Response section, and it will create the Request for you. You can then use it through the browser with Hurl It, copy the curl command into a terminal, or start building HTTP Requests in the language of your choice. To get different data you just change the API Endpoint URL. (If you selected 'Personal' you'll have access to all the Intraday records as well.)

That really is it. Now you can start writing programs to pull down all your data and save to file. (Requests are limited to 150 an hour.) And then the real super fun bit of visualising all that data, at all those different granularities begins.

One day graph of fitbit data; sleep and heartrate
Photo by chebe