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Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

jeffhuang.com

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#11
The author also links to his student's analysis of a bunch of sleep trackers: http://sleep.cs.brown.edu/comparison/ which is quite interesting; the TL;DR is: it pretty much doesn't matter which one you choose; the data aren't particularly scientific but can be fun to look at.

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#12
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is https necessary here?

Without https, a man in the middle could easily rewrite your website's content in different ways for different purposes, inject scripts, etc. Which at first sounds a little theoretical except that ISPs have actually done this to inject banner ads into unsecured pages (article's about a smaller ISP, but iirc Comcast has done this before as well): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-...

Comcast used this technique to notify me I was about to hit my 1TB monthly cap. In that case, I was happy that they did so.

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without https, a man in the middle could easily rewrite your website's content in different ways for different purposes, inject scripts, etc. Which at first sounds a little theoretical except that ISPs have actually done this to inject banner ads into unsecured pages (article's about a smaller ISP, but iirc Comcast has done this before as well): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-...

Comcast used this technique to notify me I was about to hit my 1TB monthly cap. In that case, I was happy that they did so.

Seems intrusive to me - wouldn't an email or text message have been a more appropriate channel to deliver that message?

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast used this technique to notify me I was about to hit my 1TB monthly cap. In that case, I was happy that they did so.

Seems intrusive to me - wouldn't an email or text message have been a more appropriate channel to deliver that message?

Yeah, I just thought it was an interesting twist. Sometimes harmful techniques can be leveraged for good.

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems intrusive to me - wouldn't an email or text message have been a more appropriate channel to deliver that message?

Yeah, I just thought it was an interesting twist. Sometimes harmful techniques can be leveraged for good.

Let's hope the water utility doesn't decide to send out a spray of brown water when it's time to remind people to leave their taps open when the temperature goes below freezing

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#17

Is it possible for you to throw up the contents of ApiService in a gist somewhere?

With some small research, it looks like there is some bits and pieces around;

https://github.com/chendo/sense-api.cr https://www.chameth.com/2016/04/10/sense-api/

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is https necessary here?

It's not, but there's a serious trend towards a security-first mindset. IMO, the idea is that if everything is secured, nothing forgets to be secured, or is left un-secure accidentally. There are also those who simply don't want people knowing what they're reading online, even if it's just programming blogs or other "harmless" stuff.

Agreed. You can't make a mistake when there's no decision to make.

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#19
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is https necessary here?

Without https, a man in the middle could easily rewrite your website's content in different ways for different purposes, inject scripts, etc. Which at first sounds a little theoretical except that ISPs have actually done this to inject banner ads into unsecured pages (article's about a smaller ISP, but iirc Comcast has done this before as well): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-...

I was under the impression that I wouldn't care about somebody MITMing me, but you've made me see a number of things in that vein that would bother me.

Re: Extracting my data from the Hello Sense sleep tracker

#20
post #11

The author also links to his student's analysis of a bunch of sleep trackers: http://sleep.cs.brown.edu/comparison/ which is quite interesting; the TL;DR is: it pretty much doesn't matter which one you choose; the data aren't particularly scientific but can be fun to look at.

A semi-decent heart rate monitor (even a Fitbit) is all you need to track sleep quality, I think. It's also much more reliable to detect when you fall asleep vs motion sensors (alone). If I have a good nights' sleep, my heart rate plummets quickly and pretty much flatlines for 7 hours.

I can see the difference if I've been drinking alcohol, if I was woken up in the night or if I'm ill. All of these things tend to produce either an elevated heart rate, or a heart rate that slowly declines over the night (rather than a steep initial drop).

The study is cool, but is there a comparison to a control instrument that can actually detect REM sleep? My conclusion from that graph was that none of those trackers are any good at telling you at which point you are in your sleep cycle, but most are OK at guessing your bedtime.

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