Jeff Huang’s · Extracting My Data from the Microsoft Band.

When the Microsoft Band was announced, I was thrilled to discover the first wrist-worn device to have both a heart-rate sensor and GPS, plus a slew of other sensors. My research group has been investigating how to make recommendations for people to improve their sleep from smartphone and smartwatch tracking data. My Ph.D. student Alexandra managed to snag a Band when they were hard to find, but I was disappointed when I learned that it suffered from the same problem that plagued so many promising wearable devices: the inability to export my own minute-by-minute data.

…Simply pasting the URL into a browser wouldn’t work because you have to reuse the same authentication token the Microsoft Health app is using, but editing a prior request should let you retrieve your entire raw data stream without retrieving each event one by one.

To summarize how the Band works, some data is cached on the phone app while the rest is stored on Microsoft servers in the “cloud”. By intercepting the phone app’s requests to the server, you can download the raw data being sent or retrieve your entire historical data like heart-rate, gps, step count, etc. down to the minute level. Happy tracking!

Clever! Read more!