I’ve been interested in health data as much as anything else over the past few years. I bought the Withings Pulse (now called Pulse Ox) a number of years back thinking it would be more hackable than the FitBit, but it basically isn’t.

I’m a little uncomfortable handing over my heart rate, level of daily activity, weight, and sleeping habits over to a company that has none of the legal obligations of privacy that a hospital or doctor would have. But to use these devices, you have no choice but to upload all this data onto their servers.

Then along comes Angel Sensor. They started out as an Indiegogo campaign a few years back and now they are producing the devices commercially. Their website rang a bunch of bells with me:

• Unrestricted access to sensor API
• Designed for makers
• You own the data

It sounded good, so I ordered the newer Angel Sensor M1 and received it about a week ago.

After receiving it, I began trying to play around with it. The device itself is quite impressive. Unlike the Withings device, it tracks your heart rate constantly, so I might be able to monitor stress level over the course of the day, etc. It also seems like it has a few more sensors built in such as gyroscope.

The only obvious thing it is missing is a display. On the Withings, I can mostly interact with it through the single button and small bluish display on the device, with the mobile hookup just for syncing historical data and reviewing it. It appears that the Angel Sensor approach is to use the mobile phone as the primary interface. You can track steps and heart rate in real time on the phone, so if you were exercising and wanted to monitor it this is a much better approach. (You can’t wear the device and look at it while exercising.) But the downside is that I need to carry my phone with me if I want to exercise until I reach a certain number of steps.

I’m not sure how much of a downside this is since I usually carry my phone anyway.

The real downside is the lack of functional software. The software in Google Play works, but does nothing more than show you the current sensor readings. No analysis or history. No instructions. No automatic firmware download and upgrade.

Here is a screenshot:

This bothered me until I figured out what this probably means. A bunch of hardware guys got together and released a product. They also released a very simple demo software that programmers can use as a jumping off point for designing their own apps. But they haven’t successfully created the online community necessary to get an ecosystem of programmers on board.

While I had a fair amount of experience programming Java in its early days (long before Android was a twinkle in Google’s eye) I was never much of a fan of the language, so I was hesitant to jump in to programming my own app.

But then over the weekend I saw this:
https://github.com/AngelSensor/angel-sdk/tree/master/Experiments/01-Python-Got-Pulse

Apparently some of the basic examples of interacting with this device on GitHub are in Python. Python, on the other hand, is a joy to program. The examples are for interfacing with your PC (presumably for testing purposes) but I’ve also done some Python programming on Android, too.

Now I’m considering whether to try programming for this device after all.

I’ll start with the examples and work from there.