[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) - API for wearables and labs
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Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) - API for wearables and labs
Maitham here, we're building an API for at-home health data
(https://tryvital.io). We allow developers to easily connect to
hundreds of wearable devices and deliver at-home lab tests to their
users, with a few lines of code. Health data from wearables and
labs sit in various data sources, each requiring a different
integration. Most with bad documentation and some even needing a
partnership. Data collected from these sources play a crucial role
in health monitoring. Our goal is to enable developers to build
applications on top of it. Having previously worked as an engineer
at a telehealth company, I saw firsthand how hard it is to build
and maintain integrations with labs, wearables and medical devices.
I personally became a health enthusiast trying to fix my own
problems after having over ten surgeries, suffering from IBS, and
sleep apnea. We've built an API that gives you access to over 300
devices directly through our SDKs or our API. We also expose a
plaid-like widget to connect devices. For our lab test API, we have
partnered with independent labs in the US and have a physician
network covering all 50 states, allowing any company to order at-
home functional tests. Our docs can be found here
(https://docs.tryvital.io). Our existing customers use our API to
build apps to help allergy sufferers, wellness and fitness
coaching, metabolic health support, and sleep optimisation. We have
an API for individual developers and we charge based on the number
of connected users and a platform fee for at-home lab tests. We
open-source all our libraries and SDK's, and hope by doing so we
can both encourage more open data standards and alleviate privacy
concerns. One last thing! We know privacy is extremely important
when it comes to health data, we anonymise all data by default and
we use Evervault to encrypt the data, you can read more about it
here https://docs.tryvital.io/welcome/privacy. We also have an
upcoming feature to set auto-expiry on data, that allows companies
to set a period that the data stays stored for.
Author : maith1
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-07-21 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tryvital.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (tryvital.io)
| _l_z_b_th wrote:
| omgwtfusb wrote:
| Looks great, are you looking for engineers without frontend
| experience by any chance?
|
| Having looked at the job offers I see some overlap between my
| experience and what you need - I've been working previously as a
| backend dev and a data engineer, in spare time made a little go
| app to control a BLE enabled vaporizer - but I've never used
| React, my JS knowledge is kind of stuck circa 2012...
| maith1 wrote:
| We are! Could you send an email to maitham@tryvital.io
| ShaneCurran wrote:
| Very cool, have always wondered when there'd be a "Plaid for
| healthcare data". Looking forward to playing around with the
| product.
|
| Also, great to see you're encrypting sensitive data with
| Evervault!
|
| [Disclosure: founder of Evervault here]
| maith1 wrote:
| Evervault has been great! Thanks Shane.
| adampal wrote:
| 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.
| gkapur wrote:
| 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?
| maith1 wrote:
| 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.
| abuehrle wrote:
| 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!
| maith1 wrote:
| 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.
| davidgu wrote:
| Super cool product, congrats on the launch Maitham :) Good to
| hear that all the data is encrypted & anonymised, since that
| would be my #1 concern with health data. (Evervault also looks
| interesting, I didn't know there was a plug-and-play way to do
| this!)
| CharlesW wrote:
| "All the wearables with one integration"
|
| I wasn't able to find a list of supported devices. Mind pointing
| me to it?
| maith1 wrote:
| Sure, the list of supported providers can be found here
| https://docs.tryvital.io/wearables/providers/Introduction and
| the list of supported device models here
| https://docs.tryvital.io/wearables/providers/Introduction#fu...
| plantaion wrote:
| 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?
| maith1 wrote:
| 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.
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