Rethinking Wearables Integration: Why We Built Open Wearables

Wearables integration is no longer a differentiator. It’s a baseline expectation.

If you’re building a health, fitness, longevity, or performance product in 2026, users expect their data from Apple Watch, Garmin, Polar, or Suunto to be available by default. Sleep, HRV, steps, workouts. Consistent. Reliable. Ready to be used for real features, not just charts.

Getting there, however, is still harder than it should be.

Most teams either spend weeks integrating individual wearable APIs or rely on SaaS aggregation platforms that trade short-term speed for long-term lock-in.

This week, we launched Open Wearables on Peerlist to introduce an alternative approach.

An open, self-hosted wearable API that gives developers full control over how wearable data is integrated, stored, and used.

What is Open Wearables?

Open Wearables is an open-source, self-hosted platform that provides a unified wearable API across multiple providers.

Instead of building and maintaining separate integrations for each device ecosystem, you deploy Open Wearables inside your own infrastructure and connect your application to a single, consistent API.

From your app’s perspective, wearable data comes in one format, regardless of where it originated.

At a high level, Open Wearables is designed to be:

• Open-source (MIT license) – transparent, auditable, and extensible

• Self-hosted and single-tenant – your infrastructure, your data

• Free from per-user or per-request fees – no SaaS pricing tied to growth

• Developer-first – focused on APIs and data models, not dashboards

• AI-ready by design – structured, normalized data that’s easy to reason over

This is not a plug-and-play SaaS product.

It’s infrastructure you own and build on top of.

Open Wearables is built by Momentum, a healthcare engineering team with hands-on experience delivering production systems that rely on Apple Health integration, Garmin integration, and complex wearable data pipelines across fitness, wellness, and healthcare use cases.

The project grew directly out of those real-world constraints.

How wearables integration has worked so far

Until now, teams building with wearable data have usually followed one of two paths.

Option 1: Integrate each wearable directly

In this model, you connect to each provider individually:

• Apple Health API, which is local and requires a mobile app

• Garmin integration via cloud APIs, OAuth, and webhooks

• Polar and Suunto APIs with their own access models

• Fitbit or other providers if broader coverage is needed

Each integration comes with its own set of constraints:

• Different authentication and permission flows

• Inconsistent data schemas and naming conventions

• Provider-specific rate limits and sync behaviors

• Separate error handling and monitoring logic

This approach gives you full control, but it comes at a cost.

Each provider adds weeks of implementation time and increases the long-term maintenance burden as APIs evolve and edge cases accumulate.

Option 2: Use a SaaS aggregation platform

To reduce integration complexity, many teams turn to SaaS platforms that offer a unified wearable API out of the box.

These platforms simplify early development by abstracting away individual providers and exposing a single interface.

However, this convenience introduces new trade-offs:

• Recurring per-user or per-connection fees

• Vendor lock-in at the data and infrastructure layer

• Proprietary schemas that are difficult to migrate away from

• Pricing models that scale with user growth rather than actual usage

• Limited flexibility to extend or customize the integration logic

Teams often ship faster initially, but over time give up control over how wearable data is stored, processed, and evolved — even though it’s one of the core inputs to their product.

Why Open Wearables is a better way

Open Wearables takes a third approach to wearable integration.

Instead of building and maintaining everything yourself, or outsourcing the entire data layer to a SaaS provider, you run an open integration layer inside your own infrastructure.

You keep ownership of the system while avoiding repeated, provider-by-provider work.

1. You control the infrastructure

Open Wearables is deployed in your environment and operates within your existing stack.

That means:

• Your own database and storage

• Your cloud account and networking setup

• Your security, access control, and compliance model

There is no external processing layer and no dependency on third-party infrastructure for core data flows. You can see how data is ingested, stored, and exposed at every step.

2. No vendor lock-in

Because Open Wearables is open-source, you’re not tied to a closed platform.

You can:

• Inspect and audit the code

• Extend or adapt integrations as needed

• Modify the data model to fit your product

• Fork the project if your requirements diverge

If your product or business model changes, the integration layer doesn’t become a constraint you need to work around.

3. One unified wearable API

From your application’s perspective, Open Wearables exposes a single, consistent API.

Health data, activity data, workouts, and time-series metrics follow the same structure regardless of their source.

Apple Health integration, Garmin integration, and other providers are normalized into a shared schema, which simplifies downstream logic, analytics, and feature development.

4. Designed with AI use cases in mind

Most wearables data problems show up after integration, not during it.

Fragmented schemas, inconsistent timestamps, and device-specific metrics make it difficult to build reliable analytics or intelligent features.

Open Wearables focuses on producing clean, normalized data that can be used for:

• Analytics and reporting

• Health and performance scoring

• Event-based alerts

• AI-driven reasoning and automation (on the roadmap)

The objective is not just to aggregate data, but to make it usable for interpretation and decision-making.

Current integrations (and what’s coming)

Available today:

• Apple Health integration

• Garmin integration

• Polar integration

• Suunto integration

Coming next:

• MCP integration and AI layer

• Oura

• Google Connect

• Samsung Health

• Fitbit

• Strava

We’re shipping incrementally and being explicit about what’s live versus what’s planned.

No inflated device counts, and no “all providers supported” claims before they’re real.

Community-driven by design

Open Wearables is designed to be more than a standalone codebase.

The project is being built in the open, with the intention that the people working with wearable data every day can influence how the foundation evolves.

That includes:

• Public GitHub issues for bugs, ideas, and roadmap discussions

• Pull requests from the community

• Open conversations around architecture, data models, and trade-offs

We’re particularly interested in input from developers, researchers, and founders who have already dealt with the realities of wearable data integration and know where existing approaches fall short.

The long-term goal is straightforward:

Open infrastructure for personal health data, shaped and improved by the people who depend on it.

Get started

If you believe wearable data infrastructure should be:

• Open

• Self-hosted

• Controlled by the teams building on top of it

then Open Wearables is worth exploring.

You can:

• Visit https://openwearables.io to learn more

• Check out the repository and run it locally

• Experiment with it, identify gaps, and contribute improvements

If the direction resonates, an upvote on Peerlist helps more developers discover the project.