RunKeeper, a mobile application for tracking your exercise and online community for fitness buffs, opened its API to the public today. Dubbed the HealthGraph, it will provide access to the variety of health and fitness data stored in RunKeeper, such as exercise, sleep, weight and blood pressure. Developers will then be able to build new applications that build upon and make sense of this data.
You can find the API documentation here.
From the blog post announcing the API:
We’ve also been quietly building a powerful correlation engine to make meaning of this robust health information across categories. Simply having a central location to store all of this data wasn’t enough-we needed to store it in a way that enabled us to help users quickly and easily make sense of it. How did their health and fitness progress over time? Which of their actions helped drive them to reach their goals? What social motivators inspired them to push themselves further? By organizing this health and fitness data in one place, establishing weighted correlations, and introducing the element of time, the Health Graph emerged.
Earlier this year, RunKeeper made its paid app free. At the time our own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote: “It’s not about app sales – it’s all about the platform.” That does seem to be how things are playing out.
RunKeeper is one of many applications in quantified self space, which take many of the techniques we might associate with data mining and business intelligence and apply them to every day life.
Can the Internet make you healthier? Find out from RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs next week at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit. Learn more.
