Introduction

In the rapidly evolving landscape of wearable technology, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The market is flooded with sleek, feature-packed devices promising to revolutionize our approach to health and fitness. Yet, beneath the polished exteriors and marketing hype lies a troubling reality: most of these devices are black boxes, their inner workings shrouded in proprietary code and closed-source hardware. As consumers, we're left in the dark about how our intimate health data is collected, processed, and potentially shared.

Enter Halo, an open-source alternative that aims to democratize health tracking. This series of articles will serve as your entry-level guide to building and using a fully transparent, customizable wearable device.

It's important to note that Halo is not intended to compete with consumer-grade wearables in terms of polish or feature completeness. Instead, it offers a unique, hands-on approach to understanding the technology behind health tracking devices.

We'll be using Swift 5 to build the accompanying iOS interface and Python >= 3.10. Since the code for this project is 100% open-source, please don't hesitate to submit pull requests, or fork the project to take it in a whole new direction.

What You'll Need

• Physical access to the COLMI R02 which you can grab for $11-$30 at the time of writing.
• A development environment with Xcode 16 installed, and an optional membership to the Apple Developer Program
• Python >= 3.10 with pandas, numpy, torch and of course, transformers installed.

Acknowledgements

This project is built on code and my learnings from the following Python repository.

Disclaimer

As a doctor first, I'm legally obligated to remind you: none of what you're about to read is medical advice. Now, let's go make some wearables beep!