The Wearable Integration Playbook
How wearable data reaches your backend, what provider approval costs in weeks, and where self-hosting changes what gets audited. Sixteen sections for developers, architects, and product teams.
Four Parts on Wearable App Development
How Wearable Data Reaches Your Backend
How data gets from a wrist to your servers. The two routes in, why Apple Health needs a mobile app, and how webhooks behave in production. Closes with three architecture patterns and what breaks in each.
Build, Buy, or Self-Host
The decision every team makes early and usually too fast, compared on data location, compliance posture and cost. Why self-hosting is a HIPAA architecture rather than a preference.
Running It in Production
Wearable integrations fail silently. The visibility that catches a dying connection before your users do, consent on iOS and Android, and where CGM crosses into regulated territory. Plus the two open health scores and the MCP server behind them.
Getting It Done
A timeline on three parallel tracks, so infrastructure, vendor approvals and product work stop blocking each other. Then where the open-source layer ends and commercial work begins.
Who This Wearable Integration Playbook Is For
Regulated & clinical products
Funded health platforms
Consumer wellness products
Health data platforms & EHR integrators
Longevity & preventive health
Life sciences & research
Self-Hosting, HIPAA, and GDPR for Wearable Data
Where the data lives determines your audit surface, long before anyone fills in a vendor questionnaire.
Most teams start with an aggregator API: connect once, get normalized data, skip the OAuth grind. For a prototype that holds up. At scale, every third party in the path is another party your audit has to account for, and the bill grows with your user count.
Wearable Integration Case Study: Heart Monitor
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What's New in this Edition
The original edition focused on connecting individual wearable APIs. The integration layer is becoming a commodity, and the advantage has moved to what you build on top of it.
Wearable Integration FAQ
Is this playbook specific to one programming language or framework?
No. Open Wearables ships native SDKs, a Swift SDK for iOS HealthKit and a Kotlin SDK covering Health Connect and Samsung Health on Android, plus Flutter and React Native wrappers for cross-platform teams. The architecture decisions in Part 1 apply regardless of your stack.
Do I need to be technical to get value from this?
The playbook is written for developers, architects, and technical decision-makers, but Part 2 (Build, Buy, or Self-Host) and the timeline in Part 4 are useful for product managers and founders scoping a feature before engineering gets involved.
What's the difference between this and just reading Open Wearables' documentation?
The docs tell you how to use Open Wearables. This playbook covers the decisions that come before that: whether self-hosting is the right call for your situation, which architecture pattern fits your product, and how to reason about the build-vs-buy tradeoff.
Does self-hosting mean I lose the convenience of an aggregator?
You lose some initial setup speed. You gain control over your data location, your cost model, and your exposure to a single vendor's provider relationships. Part 1 covers what a self-hosted setup requires operationally.
Is Open Wearables free to use?
Open Wearables itself is MIT-licensed and self-hostable. Momentum offers implementation consulting, custom development, and enterprise deployment support on top of it through the Signal delivery framework. Part 2 breaks down where the open-source layer ends and where paid support begins.
Which wearable providers does this cover?
The playbook discusses Apple Health, Google Health Connect, Samsung Health, Garmin, Polar, Strava, Whoop, Oura, Ultrahuman, and Fitbit as examples throughout. For the current list of providers Open Wearables supports, the GitHub repository is the source of truth since coverage changes with every release.
How long does a typical integration take?
It depends on scope, but the Heart Monitor case study in this playbook is a real reference point: one engineer, full multi-provider coverage, approximately one week, self-hosted. Part 4 breaks the wider project into three tracks that run in parallel: infrastructure setup takes about a week, vendor applications take one to two weeks depending on each provider's review process, and product development starts immediately rather than waiting on either.
Does this cover AI and LLM use cases?
Yes. Part 3 covers the MCP server that exposes health scores and structured health data as tool calls, so an AI layer reasons over computed scores and trends instead of raw time series. It also flags a scoping mistake worth avoiding: the separate Apple Health MCP Server works on exported snapshot files, not live data, and confusing the two has cost teams a rebuild.
Is HIPAA compliance covered in depth?
Yes. Part 3 covers encryption at rest and in transit, structured access logging, and business associate agreements. Self-hosting removes the need for a BAA with a third-party wearable data platform, since no third party handles the data. Where Momentum operates commercial services on top of Open Wearables for a covered entity, a BAA covers that engagement specifically.
Who is this from?
Momentum, a software development company that has been building health apps since 2016 and open-sourced Open Wearables after repeatedly rebuilding the same wearable integrations for different clients.