DataBit is a computer science capstone team from Northern Arizona University's 2020 - 2021 school year.
The goal of DataBit is to provide an API module for Dr. Kyle Winfree's WearWare system, which is a web
application designed to allow researchers to study cardiovascular diseases through the use of Fitbit devices.
This is the backend heart of the WearWare concept, aimed at providing a powerful and flexible cloud-based data collection, managment, and delivery system. It will allow registration of studies, users, and Fitbit devices, and will manage interaction with the Fitbit API to download data of all users in active studies. This includes physical activity at the minute level, heart rate at the sub-minute level, and sleep measures, among others. It will then provide a well-defined API for other modules to use to search, browse, overview, select, force a Fitbit refresh, and download targeted datasets or “slices” of datasets.
At the moment, the best way to conduct sleep and fitness studies from FitBit data is to use a third party data broker. Some issues with such third parties may include cost and providing data in real time, or for communicating with and receiving feedback from the scientific community. To address these problems, Dr Winfree's lab has developed previous iterations of this WearWare project, but they have had issues with being too slow and not being able to handle the millions of data points being received every day.
Our solution to these issues is to build a new system from the ground up that will be affordable for Dr. Winfree and his colleagues at the Wearable Informatics Lab. Our system will allow researchers to set up specific studies and for willing participants who own a FitBit device to enroll themselves in any of the studies that are available. This version of the system will also utilize a database that is capable of handling the extremely large amounts of data points that it needs to in real time.