Category Archives: fitness tracker

Reliability Check: Consumer and Research-Grade Wrist-Worn Heart Rate Monitors

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Wearables are ubiquitous in today’s society. Such devices have evolved in their capabilities from step counters to devices that measure calories burnt, sleep, and heart rate. It’s pretty common to meet people using a wearable or two to track their fitness goals. However, a big question remains unanswered. How accurate …read more

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Pavlok Gets a Literally Shocking Teardown

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Apparently, there is a wrist-mounted device that delivers electric shocks to the wearer when it receives the appropriate command over Bluetooth. No, it’s not part of some kind of house arrest program. If you can believe it, the gadget is actually intended to help break bad habits or wake up …read more

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Pulling Display Data off of a Fitness Tracker

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[Aaron Christophel] writes in with yet another clever hack for his D6 Fitness Tracker. Using OpenOCD and Pygame, he shows how you can pull data right off the tracker’s screen and sent it to the computer.

This one appealed to us for its brevity. First [Aaron] launches the OpenOCD server …read more

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OTA Flash Tool Makes Fitness Tracker Hacking More Accessible

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Over the last several months, [Aaron Christophel] has been working on creating a custom firmware for cheap fitness trackers. His current target is the “D6 Tracker” from a company called MPOW, which can be had for as little as $7 USD. The ultimate goal is to make it so anyone …read more

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Fitness Trackers Don’t Have To Be Proprietary

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Fitness trackers have become a popular piece of consumer electronic equipment, with a range of models from a variety of manufacturers. Many of these commercial offerings, however, leave the consumer with the prospect of their data being drawn off to a cloud server and sold to the highest bidder, trading …read more

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Custom Firmware For Cheap Fitness Trackers

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The concept of wearable hardware is an enticing one, but it can be difficult to tackle for the first-time maker. While many of us are experienced at designing PCBs and soldering up arcane gadgets, interfacing with the soft and fleshy human form can present unforeseen difficulties. There’s a way around that, of course – leveraging an existing platform where someone else has already done the work. That’s precisely what [Aaron Christophel] has done, by reverse engineering and developing custom firmware for cheap fitness trackers (Google Translate).

The first part of [Aaron]’s work consisted of research and disassembly. After purchasing a …read more

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Fitness app Polar Flow reveals home addresses of soldiers, spies

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Polar Flow can reveal sensitive information about the lives of users, including intelligence agents, embassy workers, military men and women, workers at nuclear weapons storage sites, and so on. What is Polar Flow? Polar Flow is an app and web service … Continue reading Fitness app Polar Flow reveals home addresses of soldiers, spies→

Polar Fitness App Exposes Location of ‘Spies’ and Military Personnel

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The fitness app Polar Flow exposes the whereabouts of some of its high-profile users, including “spies” and those with sensitive positions in the military. Continue reading Polar Fitness App Exposes Location of ‘Spies’ and Military Personnel→

Hacking a Fitness Tracker

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When [rbaron] started a new job, he got a goodie bag. The contents included a cheap fitness tracker bracelet that used Bluetooth LE. Since this is Hackaday, you can probably guess what happened next: hacking ensued.

For something cheap enough to give away, [rbaron] claims it cost $10, the device has quite a bit in it. In the very tiny package, there is an OLED display, a battery, a vibration motor, and a Nordic 32-bit ARM with BLE. The FCC ID was key to identifying the device. Opening the case, which was glued down, was pretty difficult, but doable with …read more

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Smashing Security #063: Carole’s back!

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Fitness trackers breaching your privacy, how anyone can create convincing celebrity porn, and how ransomware authors are getting ripped off by scammers.
All this and much much more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast b… Continue reading Smashing Security #063: Carole’s back!→