April Updates

📝 New Integrations, Chunking Mechanism, Writing Workouts & Body Metrics to TrainingPeaks

TL;DR:

We've added Aktiia and MacrosFirst as new integrations, created a new chunking mechanism for Fitbit payloads to receive data in reverse chronological order, and enabled writing workouts and body metrics to TrainingPeaks through a new feature.

New Integrations:

🔌 What?

We've integrated with Aktiia and MacrosFirst, which are fitness tracking and nutrition apps respectively. Aktiia is a wearable that measures blood pressure 24/7, while MacrosFirst is a nutrition tracking app that helps users calculate their macro intake to achieve their fitness goals.

🤔 Why?

We aim to provide our customers with a wide range of integrations so that end users can track all their fitness-related data in one place, regardless of the source. Integrating with these new services enables us to offer more options to our customers.

💻 How?

Our engineers worked with the developers of MacrosFirst to establish a secure connection to their APIs & develop their APIs with features that make it easier for devs to access data from them. Users can now authenticate with these services and access their data through our API.

New Chunking Mechanism in Reverse Chronological Order:

📅 What?

We've re-built our chunking mechanism for Fitbit payloads, so that requests are made in reverse chronological order. This means that the most recent payloads are received first, followed by older ones, making the user experience more seamless.

🤔 Why?

Fitbit has very restrictive rate limits, which means we can only request a limited amount of data at a time. If an application wants to backfill more than two months of data, we'll need to keep retrying requests until we can fetch all the required data. By receiving the most recent data first, users can immediately see their latest fitness data, which is what most people are interested in.

💻 How?

Our engineering team has modified how we send requests for data from Fitbit, when those constitute large requests of over a month. We now make sequential requests in reverse chronological order, which allows us to retrieve the most recent data first. This enables us to provide end users with a better experience while still constrained by Fitbit's rate limits.

Writing Workouts & Body Metrics to TrainingPeaks:

🏋 ️‍♀️ What?

We've built a new feature that allows developers to write body metrics, such as heart rate variability (HRV), to TrainingPeaks, as well as planned workouts. This enables athletes to collate their workout and recovery data in one place and export training plans from apps into TrainingPeaks.

🤔 Why?

We're expanding our ability to write data back to all our integrations, enabling two-way communication with the apps that use Terra. We want to provide our customers' end users with more options to track their data and make it easier to export data to the platforms they use.

💻 How?

Developers can use a POST request and send a Terra data model to write workouts and body metrics to TrainingPeaks. Our system makes all the necessary conversions and transmits the request over to the respective API of TrainingPeaks. This enables athletes to see the training plans and body metrics generated from customers' apps, while still having the power of data contained in their TrainingPeaks account.