Dr Chris Tomlinson
A simple tutorial on extracting Heart Rate data from a fitbit via the fitbit Web API using the fitbitr from Nagi Teramo(teramonagi)
# Load fitbit web API key into global environment
#FITBIT_KEY <- "<your OAuth 2.0 Client ID>"
#FITBIT_SECRET <- "<your Client Secret>"
# Load fitbitr library by teramonagi
# Installed via devtools::install_github("teramonagi/fitbitr")
library(fitbitr)
# Authenticate using OAuth Client ID & Secret
token <- fitbitr::oauth_token()Knitting this Rmarkdown file poses a challenge as I don’t want to include my OAuth credentials! Solution is for the above chunk to not be evaluated (eval=FALSE). Knitting won’t include objects stored in the global environment, so I can’t just assign FITBIT_KEY & FITBIT_SECRET in the console prior to knitting.
Instead I will use the chunk below to first save the token in my environment to a file temp_token using saveRDS() function. Then on knitting it will recall my saved temporary token to allow the fitbitr functions to exectue. I will then add temp_tokento .gitignore to prevent it being published to this repository.
# Uncomment the line below to create the temporary token
#saveRDS(token, "temp_token")
token <- readRDS("temp_token")
# Also need to load fitbitr again as the above chunk was not evaluated
library(fitbitr)The fitbit Web API offers two levels of access to Heart Rate data. All applications can access Heart Rate Time Series. This offers the temporal resolution of 1 day, returning time spent in each HR zone (Out of Range, Fat Burn, Cardio, Peak - calculated from HRmax = 220 - Age in Years), along with a resting heart rate.
Personal applications can access the Intraday Time Series with a greater temporal resolution e.g. detail-level = 1sec OR 1min. However this access is only granted to the data of the owner of the app only!
Given that I would like to experiment with using the Fitbit to monitor patient’s heart rates this is clearly not very useful! Perhaps there is hope though as Fitbit state that “Access to the Intraday Time Series for all other uses is currently granted on a case-by-case basis” and that they are “very supportive of non-profit research and personal projects”!
For now, we will focus on Heart Rate Time Series. Let’s take a look at the structure of the data it returns for a given date. This will take the form get_heart_rate_time_series(token, date, period). Period may consist of 1d, 7d, 30d, 1w, 1m
# Set Date
date <- "2020-05-25"
hr.df <- get_heart_rate_time_series(token, date = date, period = "1w")
str(hr.df)## 'data.frame': 7 obs. of 2 variables:
## $ dateTime: chr "2020-05-19" "2020-05-20" "2020-05-21" "2020-05-22" ...
## $ value :'data.frame': 7 obs. of 3 variables:
## ..$ customHeartRateZones:List of 7
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## .. ..$ : list()
## ..$ heartRateZones :List of 7
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2440 0 0 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 134 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 135 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1440 0 0 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2314 136 684 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 133 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 134 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1356 17 67 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2589.59 3.64 0 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 133 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 134 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1439 1 0 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2131.7 116.9 674.9 11.2
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 134 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 135 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1360 14 65 1
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2363.9 12.4 0 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 134 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 135 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1438 2 0 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2634 0 0 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 134 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 135 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1440 0 0 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## .. ..$ :'data.frame': 4 obs. of 5 variables:
## .. .. ..$ caloriesOut: num 2591 170 589 0
## .. .. ..$ max : int 106 134 168 220
## .. .. ..$ min : int 30 107 135 169
## .. .. ..$ minutes : int 1362 19 59 0
## .. .. ..$ name : chr "Out of Range" "Fat Burn" "Cardio" "Peak"
## ..$ restingHeartRate : int 53 52 52 53 53 53 53
This is a slightly cumbersome format consisting of a data frame with nested lists. We can ignore customHeartRateZones as this is simply a function whereby the individual user can alter the range of their zones, this would introduce error when comparing individuals so we can disregard it.
Let’s start by looking at Resting Heart Rate, as this is the simplest metric and gives us a sense of how the data is structured
## [1] 53 52 52 53 53 53 53
This returns an integer vector of resting heart rates over the period specified, where [1] corresponds to date - period. Thus we can index it to find the resting heart rate on a given day, e.g. the second day of the period with hr.df$value$restingHeartRate[2]
We can visualise this with a simple plot.
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(hr.df, aes(x = 1:length(dateTime), y = value$restingHeartRate)) + geom_point()
Not very exciting is it?! Resting heart rate is presumably an averaged value (over an unknown time period) so there will be a degree of ‘smoothing’ applied to these values and a 7-day period probably won’t illustrate much. (side note Fitbit community discussion reveals that, as expected, it’s a proprietary secret algorith)
Now that we’ve got a feel for how the data is stored we can move on to explore the Heart Rate Zones. This will return a list of length = period with each list item consisting of a dataframe with data for a particular day, for example for the 4th day in the period.
## [[1]]
## caloriesOut max min minutes name
## 1 2131.71240 106 30 1360 Out of Range
## 2 116.89680 134 107 14 Fat Burn
## 3 674.91360 168 135 65 Cardio
## 4 11.24856 220 169 1 Peak
The plot for this will be a little more complicated as we need to transform our data out of list format. First we will use rbindlist() from the data.table package to merge our list items into a single dataframe. We could use rbind_list() from dplyr but rbindlist() has a nice idcol = TRUE argument which will allow us to create a new col id who’s value takes on the number of the list item from which the data came from. This can then be re-named to day.
We will also remove to columns “caloriesOut”, “max” and “min” which are of little interest. If we had multiple subjects they would all have different vlaues for their “max” and “min” HR zones, but using the zone names would allow a better relative comparison between individuals.
With multiple subjects calling the zones name would also be confusing, so we’ll re-name it to zone which will also give an appropriate legend description in our plot.
library(data.table)
bound <- rbindlist(hr.df$value$heartRateZones, idcol = TRUE)
# Remove cols "caloriesOut", "max" and "min"
bound <- bound[,-(2:4)]
# Rename 'ID' col to 'day' to avoid confusion if multiple subjects
names(bound)[1] <- "day"
# Rename 'name' col to 'zone'
names(bound)[3] <- "zone"Now that we’ve got the data in a suitable format we can plot it. I’ve decided to do a bar chart of minutes per day with the fill corresponding to zones.
Makes me feel rather lazy looking at this! The ‘Out of Range’ label has connotations of exceeding a maximum HR but really it means it’s below the lower limit of ‘Fat Burn’, i.e. HR < 50% of Predicted maxHR.