Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

tryvital.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#11

Post by maith1 »

plantaion wrote: post #2

Cool idea. You mentioned combating allergies and sleep problems, could this be utilised in future to monitor patients with other more serious medical conditions or post op recovery?

Exactly this, we've already started connecting to medical devices such as glucometers and blood pressure monitors, with 2 lead, 6 lead and 12 lead ECG support coming soon. We have companies using us to monitor activity post op already, as we build out our device integrations, we'll be supporting more and more medical devices as we grow.

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#13

Post by maith1 »

gkapur wrote: post #12

Very cool -- I'm curious how many different providers of at home testing you abstract away with your API and also if you have your own services arm or are abstracting away third party providers?

We work with a number labs throughout the US to provide our at-home testing API. We handle the supplies for the kits but the actual testing is carried out by our partner laboratories. We have a physician network that handles the requisition process for ordering, and have turned that into API that any developer can use.

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#14

Post by abuehrle »

This looks cool. Congrats on the launch and progress so far!

As one piece of feedback, the docs could be better. For example, at https://docs.tryvital.io/api-reference/data/workouts/#stream, I see "Get Daily Activity for user_id", but the endpoint seems to actually return time series data for a single workout. I see a bunch of oversights of this flavor.

Similarly, I'm not sure how pagination works or should work. In one list query, I see a result set of size 100. I'm not sure whether this is because only 100 items were pulled from the provider, or whether I can see more using pagination. Maybe this is in the docs, but I haven't seen it.

It would be good to have some provider-specific documentation to answer questions are set expectations around things like 1) how much historical data is available 2) details about the integration and its stability. For example, I assume with Peloton you are logging in with my credentials and using their internal API. Is this against their terms of service? Is there a risk of this breaking if they change their internal API, which obviously doesn't have the same governance considerations a public API would?

Nice work overall!

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#15

Post by maith1 »

abuehrle wrote: post #14

This looks cool. Congrats on the launch and progress so far! As one piece of feedback, the docs could be better. For example, at https://docs.tryvital.io/api-reference/data/workouts/#stream , I see "Get Daily Activity for user_id", but the endpoint seems to actually return time series data for a single workout. I see a bunch of oversights of this flavor. Similarly, I'm not sure how pagination works or should work. In…

Thanks for trying out the API. You're right our docs need some improvement here, we write these from the backend and generate them using our own custom swagger parser. We'll fix these asap! We've started adding provider specific docs like this here, https://docs.tryvital.io/wearables/providers/Guides/Freestyl... we'll be adding the rest as soon as possible.

This is why aggregating and standardising the data is hard, some API's are not public and in some cases we use credentials to generate access tokens which we then use to query the API, since we are aiding people in accessing their own data, we take a stance that people have a right to their own health data.

If the internal API does change there is some risk of breakage, we have built a tonne of monitoring around this to ensure that we stay up to date with this and react accordingly.

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#16

Post by adampal »

Wow Maitham, this looks amazing! We're building a similar product but it's specific to CPAP and sleep apena over at https://sleephq.com We're currently integrating with a few different CPAP manufacturers but we want to add other devices and wearables in the future and this looks like a great solution.

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#17

Post by maith1 »

adampal wrote: post #16

Wow Maitham, this looks amazing! We're building a similar product but it's specific to CPAP and sleep apena over at https://sleephq.com We're currently integrating with a few different CPAP manufacturers but we want to add other devices and wearables in the future and this looks like a great solution.

Thanks! Would be great to chat to see if we can help you guys out with sleep data. Let's hope on call, could you send an email to maitham@tryvital.io ?

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#18

Post by ahstilde »

Vital is incredible. They've let us build a truly unparalleled experience at Wyndly.

Maitham and his team have taken something that was mindbendingly painful and turned it into an API.

Patrick Collison says there's billion dollar companies wherever there's mountains of shit to deal with. That's what Maitham has done.

Re: Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

#19

Post by synaesthesisx »

Wow this is actually pretty impressive (I work in the digital health space and have navigated the absolute chaos associated with wearables integration before). I think there’s tremendous potential for Vital and am looking forward to playing with it!
Post reply on HN