Fitbit base station setup
The sensor will be available by December or January, Park says, and will retail for $99 use of the Fitbit website will be free. Park says that Fitbit isn’t meant to replace a sports pedometer rather, it’s meant to give people a better sense of their daily activity and act as a dieting aid. When sleep-related data is uploaded to the Web, it is used to create a graph showing the amount and quality of sleep achieved each night. The site can also log meals and create calorie budgets to tie into a diet regime.Īt night, the sensor fits into a wristband, and its accelerometer tracks tiny tremors in the wrist that correlate to different stages of sleep. For that first generation of hardware, there is an open source solution for Linux users. “I can get a real-time activity feed from my friends,” says Park. The early Fitbit models came bundled with a USB 'base station' that connected wirelessly to the Fitbit devices using the ANT protocol every so often when the device was in range it would synchronize the latest activity readings to the web service. She can also create a social network of friends, family members, or co-workers who want to share activity data.Īnother feature that Park believes sets Fitbit apart is the way that its Web service automatically converts steps taken into burned calories and lets people compare their activity with that of other Fitbit users. A person accesses her Fitbit data through a personalized page that highlights physical activity, calories burned, and sleep patterns. Know thyself: Data from the Fitbit sensor is automatically uploaded to the internet via a base station. Park demonstrated the Fitbit device in San Francisco on Tuesday at the Techcrunch50 conference, a popular launch pad for new technology companies. It is meant to be worn 24-7, and each device can run for 10 days on a single battery charge. The device can be put in a pocket, attached discreetly to a bra, or slipped into a special wristband during sleep. James Park, cofounder of Fitbit, says that one of the main goals was to make the sensor so small that it will go unnoticed no matter what a person is wearing. Every step you take: Fitbit is a wearable sensor that can track a person’s activity 24 hours a day and send the data to a website for analysis and social networking. Data is wirelessly uploaded to the Web so that users can monitor their activity and compare it with that of their friends. Fitbit, a startup based in San Francisco, has built a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person’s movement 24 hours a day to produce a record of her steps taken, her calories burned, and even the quality of her sleep. The simple pedometer has been given a makeover.