How to Integrate BLE-Based Fitness Devices into your App

Here comes the question of what stays behind the scenes — how do you integrate those BLE devices into your app? Surely, the technical side isn’t something you have to perfectly understand as the provider unless you are the person who actually performs the integration.

Yet, our goal is to give you just about enough knowledge for you to be on the same page with the tech guys talking about BLE integration. Surely, we’ll also talk about enabling communication between BLE fitness devices and your app.

Additionally, we’ll look at some fascinating BLE-based fitness device use cases, give you insights on how to simultaneously connect several devices, and share our experience in the integration process for the projects in the fitness industry that Stormotion’s worked on.

Enjoy! 🚀

🤖 BLE Device: Tech Stack Basics Relevant for Integration

At its core, Bluetooth Low Energy is a wireless network that’s used for connecting two or more devices with each other so they can communicate (exchange data, for the most part). The two keywords that describe BLE are low power consumption, high battery longevity, and rapid connection.

💼 Bluetooth, BLE & Fitness Industry Use Cases

Most likely, if you’ve come here with the request to learn about BLE-based fitness device integration, you already know why Bluetooth Low Energy is something you chose out of all the other wireless networks. However, there’s this network that always gets compared to BLE and is its ancestor — Bluetooth Classic or simply good old Bluetooth.

So, to better highlight the features of the BLE, let’s briefly discuss the main differences between these 2 networks. After that, we’ll give you a couple of fascinating BLE use cases in the fitness industry. You might get some inspiration for your own business or figure out what’s something you would avoid.

📲 BLE Fitness Integration Process

In this section, we’ll talk about how you can enable communication between the fitness device and users' mobile devices. Your users are the ones who would perform the final connection by clicking the “Connect” button. What you have to do is take care of all the back- and front-end so users have a highly user-friendly solution.

Let’s first divide this section into 2 parts. In the first part, we’ll talk about integrating your application with BLE-based fitness hardware from third-party providers. In the second one, we’ll talk about connecting custom BLE devices with applications, which is a whole different process.

Let’s start with the first option.

Third-Party Fitness Devices

The hardware part isn’t something you should worry about at all in this case. If you partner with a third-party device provider, you’ll most likely have a ready-to-use BLE-based fitness solution. They’ll also provide you with an SDK and/or API for building an app and/or establishing communication channels.

SDKs and APIs are two of the most important concepts when working with third-party providers. They’re often used in a bundle but can surely exist without one another.

An API is an intermediary between the device and the user. So, in your case, you’ll be enabling users to control a fitness device using your application. An SDK is a broader concept that combines several development tools for building an application for certain hardware of API.

Often, an SDK includes API as part of the development package. An API, on the contrary, can’t contain SDKs. To better understand the difference between these 2 concepts, you can watch this explanatory video:

The way we described it now might create an impression that the job is in fact pretty easy but don’t get us wrong — for it to be “easy”, developers need to have a high level of expertise.

🚴 Our Expertise: SportPlus & Multiple BLE Devices Integration

Even though the general steps of enabling communication between BLE fitness devices and users is a common practice, developers need to have a high level of expertise to perform these steps time- and resource-efficient.

In this section, we’ll share our fitness app development company expertise in integrating BLE-based devices for the SportPlus app. The project is extremely useful to learn about as we’ll share how to approach the integration of several BLE fitness devices using one application.

Generally, SportPlus offers various exercise equipment and machines. The company asked us to build an app that would work with multiple fitness devices, meaning that we had to enable the communication for different BLE protocols.

Here’s the summary of the steps you should take to integrate multiple BLE devices that have different protocols:

• You partner with a fitness device provider and the protocol of the device can be whichever.
• Your development team or Tech Partner tries to communicate with the device using different “languages”.
• When they finally get an interpretable reply, they define the protocols’ structure.
• Now, we’re able to connect and communicate with the device in a required “language”.

💡 Takeaways

After reading this article, we hope you have a better understanding of how the whole integration process happens. With the right approach, integrating BLE fitness devices with your application can significantly improve the user experience your customers get.

Even though we’ve provided you with a general flow of how to approach the integration process, keep in mind that you’ll most likely need to adjust the process according to your business needs.