Interoperability Headaches in Fitness and Medical Devices

The promise of device data pervades the health care field. It’s intrinsic to patient-centered medical homes, it beckons clinicians who are enamored with hopes for patient engagement, and it causes data analysts in health care to salivate. This promise also drives the data aggregation services offered by Validic and just recently, the Shimmer
integration tool from Open mHealth. But according to David Haddad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Open mHealth, devices resist attempts to yield up their data to programmers and automated tools.

Shimmer, like the rest of the Open mHealth tools, rests on their ownschemas for health data. The schemas in themselves can’t revolutionize health care. Every programmer maintains a healthy cynicism about schemas, harking back to xkcd’s cartoon about “one universal standard that covers everyone’s use cases.” But this schema took a broader view than most programs in health care, based on design principles that try to balance simplicity against usefulness and specificity. Of course, every attempt to maintain a balance comes up against complaints the the choices were too complex for some users, too simple for others. The true effects of Open mHealth appear as it is put to use–and that’s where open source tools and community efforts really can make a difference in health care. The schemas are showing value through their community adoption: they are already used by many sites, including some major commercial users, prestigious research sites, and start-ups.

The Granola library translates between Apple’s HealthKit and JSON. Built on this library, the hipbone app takes data from an iPhone and puts it in JSON format into a Dropbox file. This makes it easier for researchers to play with HealthKit data...