Gabi Schaffzin, UC San Diego
New Orleans 2019: Mapping / monitoring
Find Your Fit is an interactive and multimodal experience that uses the proprietary and encrypted translation algorithms built into the Fitbit to visualize a participant’s movement. Fitbits and similarly engineered activity trackers use digital accelerometers that sense movement, interpolating it into various biometrics such as steps taken or calories burned. These metrics are transmitted via encrypted hexadecimal values to software on a PC or smartphone, which then transmits the data to a company’s servers. When a user logs in to their dashboard, they are presented with the data as interpreted by the company’s proprietary algorithms, but as useful information. Find Your Fit intercepts this biometric data before it is uploaded to Fitbit’s servers, uses it in its raw form—sets of base-16 numbers—and arranges it in a way that any computer might understand as a bitmap image.