Okinesio – Evaluation and development of an open hardware activity tracker

Abstract

The main concern about commercial activity trackers from companies like Fitbit, Sony, Polar, Garmin and others is that users don’t own their data and they don’t have control about how their data is used by the companies. That’s why we started developing an open hardware and open source alternative: okinesio. In our paper we are presenting the results and lessons learned from our first year of developing of open hardware. We are describing the methods and results of our evaluation of a range of top-selling activity trackers regarding accuracy, underlying hardware sensors, user experience and data accessibility.