[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Terra (YC W21) - API to easily connect we...
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Launch HN: Terra (YC W21) - API to easily connect wearables to apps
Author : kyriakosel
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-11-05 12:56 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tryterra.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tryterra.co)
| ian_co wrote:
| Why no integration with Strava?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| We are trying to establish a partnership with them, and once we
| do, we will support them.
| rithvik_seela wrote:
| Super cool! I've had quite a few wearables myself so I'm a huge
| fan of what you are doing.
|
| What does the onboarding time look like? And also curious if
| Terra works with Webhooks or http?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Thats awesome !
|
| Technically the onboarding takes 5 minutes - since we work with
| webhooks, and we just need a callback url from you ! You
| receive a PUSH whenever an activity is generated.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Can't wait to have my MiBand and MiScale connected to Google Fit,
| sync'd with some online dashboard to have all the data in one
| point.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| oh yes! some developers are building online dashboards to do
| that already with terra :) i'll be honest though, I am really
| looking forward to replacing my garmin app to a better
| dashboard :)
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Isn't the Xiaomi app already integrated with Fit?
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| This looks really interesting, nice! As a heads up your home page
| doesn't mention Apple Health at all and if I hadn't seen your
| comment here first I'd have assumed it wasn't supported and been
| a lot less interested.
|
| At a very high level, how do I get data from a device to you?
| Does that require eg. an iOS app specific to my service?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Whoops nicely spot! my mistake on apple, will be added the
| soonest!
| kyriakosel wrote:
| we are a widget + api that can be embedded inside your app.
| thomm-o wrote:
| Wow terra looks really cool - surprised no one had thought of
| this yet!
| kyriakosel wrote:
| haha thanks!
| 0xff78d4a5 wrote:
| Not to be confused with Terra (https://terra.bio) I suppose.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| haha indeed! We are Terra ( https://tryterra.co )!
| endisneigh wrote:
| I wish you luck. Fitness apps are getting decimated and people
| are going back to gyms in droves. Peloton is down 35%.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Well we are all gym goers in Terra, and we all use wearables :)
| The more wearables evolve, the better we understand our health,
| and hence the better fitness app recommendations become !
| alexmvp2021 wrote:
| This is brilliant. Great work, Kyriakos and Raouf!
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Thanks!
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Hi HN, we are Kyriakos and Raouf, founders of Terra
| (https://tryterra.co). We make it easy for health and fitness
| apps to safely and easily access data from wearable devices.
|
| If you have a health app, there are so many wearables and sensors
| to connect to. Worse, every company has different tech (web-
| sockets, HTTP etc) and different data formats, even for the same
| kinds of data. Creating so many integrations with APIs, SDKs etc
| is resource draining, then you have to normalise data, and of
| course constantly do updates. And the documentation in this space
| is really bad.
|
| I got hooked on wearables 10 years ago while serving in the
| Special Forces, when I needed to perform at my best, under the
| worst conditions. I wanted to use the old Polar HRM (heart rate
| monitor) to improve my performance. The data I was getting was so
| insightful, I started buying every wearable that came out over
| the coming years: Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Apple - you name it. I
| then became a fitness geek, and started learning more about
| nutrition, physiology etc. While discussing one day with my soon-
| to-be cofounder, who was also a gold medalist swimmer, we were
| asking ourselves - why can we not connect our data with an app
| like Spotify? Couldn't song recommendations be better if they
| used your heart rate? Or Netflix movie recommendations, and so
| on? That's how it started. We built an API, and a
| widget. Once you start speaking to our API, you can enable your
| users to connect Garmin, Fitbit, Oura, Peloton, Zwift, Withings,
| Training Peaks, Suunto, Apple, Polar and Wahoo to you. Then, you
| receive normalised data in your callback url whenever it is
| available. If you prefer, you can install our widget in your
| front end (https://docs.tryterra.co/widget), and it enables users
| to connect their wearables, without you building any additional
| layers.
|
| Regarding the backend: We establish a PUSH connection with you,
| and whenever the data is generated, we send it to the callback
| url. It can be sleep data, activity data, body composition, and
| others (you can check the docs https://docs.tryterra.co). On your
| end, all you see is websockets. On our end, we deal with the
| providers' standards.
|
| Our customers built apps that improve your sleep, VR apps that
| offer gym experiences, even apps that generate music based on
| your heart rate. There are health dashboards that show your
| health data from different providers, apps that pay you to train,
| apps that use wearable data to improve training recovery, and
| apps that help corporations provide offerings for employees to
| work out.
|
| We charge based on API usage, and we never store any of the
| health information that passes through. We're both HIPAA and GDPR
| compliant. If you want to try it out, you can sign up here
| https://tryterra.co, receive keys, and access both the widget and
| the API.
|
| Thanks a lot for reading this! Would love to hear your ideas on
| what you'd like to see from the API, and some interesting app
| ideas that can be built by using Terra !
| guzik wrote:
| Awesome idea! Our startup would be very interested in working
| with you, as our goal is only to provide data through our
| wearables. Would like to leave everything else to 3rd parties
| (like your company).
|
| What's your business model? Couldn't find on your website.
|
| EDIT: now I see that you charge per requests. Consider building
| "pricing" subpage.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Hey that's awesome! We have a monthly subscription, or a pay as
| you go, depending on your needs! If you can sign up on the
| page, we can schedule a brief call and get you onboarded! It
| takes only 5 minutes :)
| kyriakosel wrote:
| And indeed - we are about to finalise the pricing page ! Thanks
| for the recommendation!
| melaniestrong wrote:
| Some day my Oura ring and my Apple watch will naturally integrate
| what they measure about my health and activity with my Strava,
| Headspace and maybe even electronic health records. Looking
| forward to seeing how you think about the integration of consumer
| wellness and clinical medical data into one seamless experience.
| liotier wrote:
| I don't look forward to private health insurance getting their
| hands on that data. Regulators certainly won't allow it anyway
| - European regulators at least.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Yes. That's why we think with the user in mind first, to make
| sure that this doesn't happen.
| clukic wrote:
| This is the dream, but outside of government intervention I
| don't think it will ever be realized. There's no effective
| standards body, and the big players have little interest in
| sharing their data in any robust way. There's so many devils in
| the details of these specifications.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Absolutely. Your Oura and Apple watch, plus all other wearables
| are measuring data on a dynamic way, rather than the static we
| had all the previous years. Thus the insights are a much better
| indicator of your health, than what it used to be. From our
| customers we already see a strong development in the consumer
| wellness space !
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| What do you actually use that information for?
|
| -----
|
| I've tried to get into this stuff, but I've found it completely
| useless for making any sort of impact on my day-to-day. I could
| see it being useful for athletes looking to hit their peak, but
| as a dude that just wants to bike and ski for fun, I get all of
| the information I need by just asking: "How am I feeling and
| what contributed to this".
|
| The metrics are all just noise. That basically come down to:
|
| * Have I been eating well?
|
| * What have I consumed that's "terrible" for me (drinking,
| unhealthy food, etc)?
|
| * Have I exercised recently?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| I think that there are a lot of ways to actually use the
| information. See the example of Eight Sleep : They use your
| sleep data to actually improve your sleep. Or Myfitnesspal:
| Connect your wearable to know exactly how many calories you
| need after training, and so on!
| jpascasio wrote:
| Terra is facilitating data interoperability within fitness,
| wellness and health. Cheers to this great team that will enable a
| healthier future centered around personalization!
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > Garmin, Polar, Suunto, Apple - you name it.
|
| I'm not a web health app developer, I'm a wearable developer: I
| name "Open Smartwatch GPS" [1] (currently in development).
|
| There's not a lot of data yet, but how could I (or, more
| importantly, future users of Open Smartwatch, or future users of
| phone and apps that would want to serve health and movement data)
| connect to your service? Can an end user upload/push raw data as
| JSON, CSV, or as MQTT messages, and access it from an arbitrary
| health app that uses your service?
|
| > On our end, we deal with the providers' standards.
|
| Ha! Wearable hardware "standards". Good joke! Do you integrate
| with GPSBabel [2] on the backend? But a commendable effort;
| there's a lot of wonky hardware out there, so thanks for unifying
| the multitude of providers.
|
| Also, how does your service compare to Tapirik?
|
| [1]: https://open-smartwatch.github.io/
|
| [2]: http://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-1.7.0/The_Formats.html
|
| [3]: https://tapiriik.com/
| kyriakosel wrote:
| 'Wearable developer'- I love it :)
|
| We don't currently support end user's pushing raw data to us,
| what use case are you thinking, out of interest ?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I generate step data (currently just local to the watch) and
| TCX files, either with just GPS data from the watch or with
| BLE heart rate strap data.
|
| Maps and workout journals are all I'm personally looking for,
| and I get those by emailing TCX files to
| <username>@smashrunimport.com.
|
| Getting reliable GPS antenna performance is my current focus,
| though.
|
| I'm honestly not sure what your customers' customers are
| using it for.
| FrankLicea wrote:
| This is great! I used to maintain connections to all kinds of
| social media APIs; lots of on going maintenance. neat to see a
| service dedicated to this. What are the SLAs like?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Thanks so much! Amongst others, maintaining APIs while they
| constantly update is difficult, and hence why we work on this !
| Also you get more and more wearables coming to the market
| awb wrote:
| Great idea! Are you focusing on corporate clients? It sounds like
| you charge for the product but I couldn't find your pricing.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| We are focusing on apps/startups :) We have a subscription per
| month!
| tdfirth wrote:
| Hope this is not off-topic but I just want to say that Kyriakos
| (the OP) is a great guy. He gave up some of his time earlier this
| week to help me and my co-founder prep for our YC interview.
|
| We didn't know him before this so I can only conclude it was a
| genuinely kind act from someone looking to give back to the
| community.
|
| All the best and good luck with Terra!
| kyriakosel wrote:
| wow thanks so much for this. So so happy that you guys made it
| into the next batch, you are such legends !
| clukic wrote:
| This is a great idea, and a welcome addition to the space.
| Fitness data standards are exceptionally poor and there's very
| little alignment between the major data collectors. This has
| resulted in the creation of a small army of syncing apps,
| developed to move data around between the most popular platforms,
| but as far as I know no ones attempted anything like this.
|
| Having spent nearly a decade trying to extract data from the
| various walled gardens in the fitness space, I think something
| like this has really only been possible in the last few years as
| some of those walls have come down just a bit. That said, there
| are still some enormous hurdles to overcome. From the
| documentation it's not clear how OAuth is implemented. The
| authentication standards for many of these platforms are very
| diverse and often unfriendly in terms of the API agreements, rate
| limits, and various OAuth standards.
|
| I'm assuming since it would be a violation of most API terms to
| pass data to a 3rd party, that the consumer of Terra must first
| acquire their own API key and then Terra uses that on their
| behalf? Although, if that's the case, OAuth implementations must
| be very tricky, especially for APIs like Garmin's which uses
| OAuth1a.
|
| Nevertheless this can only be good news for the cause of open
| data. If it's successful, hopefully it'll create some pressure
| for these companies to expand their capabilities and relax their
| terms of service.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Thanks for this - there is indeed a serious complexity in this
| space.
|
| a) there is no standard in data structure, and hence every
| wearable company uses their own.
|
| b) The documentation quality is really lacking.
|
| c) most of those companies are updating very often, with little
| communication. hence if you are a developer in this space, you
| really struggle.
|
| d) more and more wearables are coming to the market
|
| Hence we solve the above with robust docs, a standard data
| model, and a widget, to make it super easy. We of course are
| constantly learning, and improve the fastest way possible
| mam4 wrote:
| Not bothered its a leading cryptocurrency name ?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| It's also 'Earth/land' in Latin :)
| Lucasoato wrote:
| ...and in Italian too! :D
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Yes indeed!
| mritchie712 wrote:
| What % of people do you think have heard of that
| cryptocurrency?
| eisonomic5 wrote:
| Terra allows for engineers to be creative. Their offering reduces
| technical debt as well as time to market when feature sets are of
| concern. Even if you're not active or have a personal utility for
| biometric data, it's undeniable there is an enormous amount of
| siloed data that ought to be normalized and managed. Great
| project here.
| monosc wrote:
| I've been in the health tech space for a while and my main
| questions are:
|
| - how's Terra's proposition different from Human API? (they
| started exactly the same as you do)
|
| - are you compliant with any regulations related to
| storing/processing health records (i.e. HIPAA, etc.)? Asking as
| couldn't find anything mentioned about it on the website.
| eyphka wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, is Apple Health supported?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| We support Apple health indeed!
| andiareso wrote:
| Can't wait for this to be bought some day and all the data handed
| over to my insurance...
| kyriakosel wrote:
| We don't store any data, and we have no databases :)
| chrischapman wrote:
| Where is it stored? Who is storing it?
|
| Why do you have this in your privacy policy?
|
| > We may share Your personal information in the following
| situations:
|
| > With Service Providers: We may share Your personal
| information with Service Providers to monitor and analyze the
| use of our Service, to contact You.
|
| > For business transfers: We may share or transfer Your
| personal information in connection with, or during
| negotiations of, any merger, sale of Company assets,
| financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of Our business
| to another company.
|
| > With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our
| affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to
| honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent
| company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or
| other companies that We control or that are under common
| control with Us.
|
| > With business partners: We may share Your information with
| Our business partners to offer You certain products, services
| or promotions.
|
| > With other users: when You share personal information or
| otherwise interact in the public areas with other users, such
| information may be viewed by all users and may be publicly
| distributed outside.
|
| Edit: Apologies if this comes across as a bit blunt. Your
| project looks really interesting and clearly has huge
| potential. Its just that personal data and how it gets used
| is increasingly important.
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Absolutely - thanks for the question so i'll clarify here:
|
| On one side, you have wearables, and on the other you have
| apps.
|
| We are the API that enables the user to connect their
| wearable data to the apps.
|
| Meaning that when the user gives their consent, the API
| facilitates the connection with the app. At the same time,
| we never see the data, and we don't store them.
|
| With the user's consent, they give access to the app, and
| hence the app as long as they agree with the wearable
| supplier regulations and terms of use, they get access to
| the information. Each of the wearable supplier (eg Garmin,
| Fitbit etc) have their own rules, and all the apps need to
| comply with them!
| peter_retief wrote:
| I have registered, keen to see what you are providing?
| kyriakosel wrote:
| Thank you! I just emailed you
| Ali_Jiwani wrote:
| Keep crushing it Kyriakos and Raouf!
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