Launch HN: Vital (YC W20) – API for wearables and labs

[maith1]

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.

[abuehrle]

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]

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.

[whelton]

Vital is awesome. I’ve built various integrations for health services for Conjure[0], and the implementation and maintenance of these does not bring much joy to my life.

Having worked with Vital’s API and Webhooks, I am so excited for our use of it in Conjure to go live. I really love their normalization of data (such as sleep[1]).

[0] https://conjure.so

[1] https://docs.tryvital.io/api-reference/data/sleep/

[maith1]

Conjure is great!

[ahstilde]

Vital is incredible. They've let us build a truly unparalleled experience at Wyndly.

Maitham and his team have taken something that was mindbendingly painful and turned it into an API.

Patrick Collison says there's billion dollar companies wherever there's mountains of shit to deal with. That's what Maitham has done.

[davidgu]

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!)

[adampal]

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.

[maith1]

Thanks! Would be great to chat to see if we can help you guys out with sleep data. Let's hope on call, could you send an email to [e-mail] ?

[kawicoder]

how does it compare to oscar that's open source? https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/ i like oscar because all the data analytics happen on your computer locally, so nothing gets sent out and you know its private

[CharlesW]

"All the wearables with one integration"

I wasn't able to find a list of supported devices. Mind pointing me to it?

[maith1]

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...

[omgwtfusb]

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]

We are! Could you send an email to [e-mail]

[ShaneCurran]

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]

Evervault has been great! Thanks Shane.

[gkapur]

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]

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.

[tylersgordon]

"Plaid for healthcare data" looks fantastic, and I love the focus on privacy. I've used https://nomie.app/ before to log things (they have an API), and I'm looking forward to the day when all my wearable and health data can be connected.

How does the lab testing API work? How do doctors' orders fit in?

[maith1]

We've partnered with a number of labs in the U.S. and have a physicians network that covers all 50 states, that allows us to write doctors orders if your customers meet the pre-requisite requirements as agreed with our doctor. Once you're signed up, we'll have an onboarding call, where we discuss what your testing requirements are, typically it takes 3-6 weeks from inquiry to going live with your patients.

[AndrianV]

Excellent, are you perhaps searching for engineers without prior front-end development experience?

[arminsergiony]

Wow, this really is pretty amazing (I work in the digital health space and have navigated the absolute chaos associated with wearables integration before). I think that Vital has a lot of potential and can't wait to play with it!

[synaesthesisx]

Wow this is actually pretty impressive (I work in the digital health space and have navigated the absolute chaos associated with wearables integration before). I think there’s tremendous potential for Vital and am looking forward to playing with it!

[brap]

For the love of god, can you just show me the code without all of this typing animation? I’m trying to actually understand what I’m reading but it keeps looping and deleting the text.

[maith1]

All our docs are available here https://docs.tryvital.io/ happy to help you onboard, the animation on the home page is just an example. We'll slow down the animation speed going forward.

[plantaion]

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]

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.

[utpaldg]

Congratulations on the launch! Quick question - How is this different from Terra?