Open SmartWatches

There's a lot of potential for Open Hardware/Open Source smartwatches. Smartwatches can be especially useful for monitoring medical information such as heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, oxygen level and sleep. They can be used for fall detection and some automatically call 911 when they detect an issue. They can also be used as emergency alert systems. Commercial options charge recurring fees for medical alert monitoring, fitness tracking or other services that might invade your privacy or have access to your personal data. The Open Source community is always bragging about how Open Source applications can be better than commercial ones because anyone can participate and give feedback or fix issues. Smartwatch manufacturers are just beginning to explore the potential for using a smartwatch to monitor and analyze medical data. There's a lot of room for development and improvement in this area for software that can display medical information in a user friendly way, analyze it and make recommendations based on it.

With all that potential, you'd think there would be more activity in this arena for FLOSS and Open hardware developers. However, when I ask for recommendations for smartwatches, there's relatively little to choose from. Some Open Hardware options just don't include the sensor capabilities to check medical statistics. Without the hardware, it's even harder to develop the software. Some Open Source software projects focus on working with closed, commercial watches and give an Open Source operating system alternative to the vendor's solution. This may help with privacy issues such as who has access to the medical data your watch collects. However, the Open Source alternatives may not be able to take full advantage of the hardware or have full access to all hardware features the way a proprietary solution designed for the device could. To date, I've yet to find an Open smartwatch that is competitive with popular proprietary options. There are some interesting Open smartwatch choices out there, but they're not tailored for medical uses.

Since I haven't been able to find a decent list of medical smartwatch Open Hardware and Libre Software options, I figured I'd put together whatever recommendations I could find in one place. Am hoping the situation will change. If you have other suggestions for potential medical smart devices, please let me know about them.


Open Hardware options

https://watchy.sqfmi.com/
https://open-smartwatch.github.io/
https://www.infinityiot.org/infinity-watch/
https://mutantc.gitlab.io/mutantW_V1.html

Open Software options

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/nodomain.freeyourgadget.gadgetbridge/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.espruino.gadgetbridge.banglejs/
https://asteroidos.org/faq/
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTime
https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime