FitBit

What is Fitbit?

Fitbit is a brand of wearable fitness devices and a supporting software platform designed to help people monitor and improve their health and wellness. Fitbit devices track a wide range of activity and health metrics including steps, distance, heart rate, calories burned, workouts, sleep and more. Their popularity has soared in recent years with over a quarter of the UK population now owning a wearable fitness device, many of which are Fitbits.

So, why should you care? Well, if you’re building (or thinking of building) a health, wellness or fitness focused app, Fitbit can offer you access to a wealth of real world data that can help you create more engaging, personalised experiences for your users. You can use activity, sleep and biometric data to offer customised programs, track progress and provide actionable recommendations that will genuinely help your users.

What can Fitbit offer to your business?

If you’re looking for ways to create healthier employees, more attractive services or more engaging digital products, Fitbit gives you access to something incredibly valuable - real world health data. Let's take a look at how this could positively impact your business:

Improve the well being of your own employees - Charity starts at home and regardless of what industry you're in, if you want to invest in your own people, Fitbit is a tried and tested way to encourage healthier habits at work. You can run activity challenges, track participation and create friendly competition that can really help promote engagement and morale. More than that, over time, these initiatives can even help to reduce absenteeism and support lower healthcare costs through prevention rather than reaction.

Support patients remotely - Moving externally now, if your business supports people with ongoing health needs, Fitbit lets you monitor activity, heart health and lifestyle patterns without constant in person check ins. This is particularly useful if you work with chronic conditions, long term care or wellbeing programmes. You save time, your clients get better continuity of care and everyone benefits from earlier intervention and less travel - including the environment!

Make informed decisions - Whilst Fitbit’s data is useful at an individual level for health conscious users, it can also be used to analyse data across different groups of individuals to understand broader behaviour across different geographic areas, different social standings, and demographic segments. This is very useful if you’re involved with large scale wellness programmes or conducting research.

Fitbit web API for developers - If like the good folk here at Cool Code Company, you're in the development space, Fitbit gives you access to a Web API that allows third party applications to securely access user data (with explicit permission of course), including daily activity, nutrition and body metrics. This data can then be used to build dashboards, analytics and integrations that take advantage of this real world health data to drive insight, engagement and innovation.

Best project for Fitbit

Now that you understand what Fitbit can offer to your business, let's tackle the question of - what should you actually build with Fitbit?

Health insight applications

You can create platforms that help users understand their own health trends over both the short and long term. This is much more useful than just showing them how active they were today for example as it shows them their how their actual habits are changing over time and what’s driving those changes. 

Apps that drive behavioural changes

Whilst yes, Fitbit is great for tracking health patterns, it can also be used in applications that nudge people towards making changes. Whether it’s encouraging movement after long periods of inactivity or highlighting poor sleep patterns, these systems can help your users take action at the most effective time.

Apps that focus on sleep, recovery and balance

Sleep and recovery stats can be overlooked when compared with the likes of steps, heart rate and calories burned, but they’re some of the most valuable insights Fitbit provides. You can build platforms that help users understand how well they’re recovering, how much sleep is optimal for them and even identify links between stress and sleep patterns.

Personalised coaching platforms

If your business involves fitness, wellbeing or lifestyle improvement (personal trainers, gyms etc), Fitbit is good for tailoring the experience to each of your individual users. You can adapt goals, feedback and recommendations based on what people are actually doing in real life rather than what they say they plan to do.

How can we help?

Our experienced team of developers understand the intricacies of the Fitbit ecosystem, how its various components interact and how to use them effectively to support your business goals. Whether you have a fully scoped Fitbit enabled app or just an initial idea of how Fitbit data could add value to your business, we can help you turn it into a tangible, effective solution.