Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

Exploring the HealthVault Data

You can look at the data stored from Fitbit in the HealthVault user interface (sometimes referred to as the HealthVault Shell), as shown in Figure 2-7.

Figure 2-7. Sleep session in HealthVault

Viewing information through the HealthVault user interface is convenient, but a user cannot retrieve the entire information by exporting the data. As a power user and a quantifier, I would like the data to be available to me to do some data-noodling. For that purpose, I would get this data in command-line format using the HealthVault PowerShell plug-in (HvPosh). You can find the details of installing and extending this plug-in at https://github.com/vaibhavb/HvPosh. PowerShell can export data to a standard CSV format that can be consumed by a variety of other tools, simple or advanced, that let you do calculations and generate charts.

Once you have installed PowerShell, load HealthVault’s plug-in into Windows PowerShell using:

Powershell> import-module HvPosh

Then, grant access to HealthVault PowerShell interface using the following command line. Note that this command will walk you through the same record-picking interface and authentication and authorization interface as we used earlier for the Fitbit application:

Powershell> Grant-HVPermission

Once you have access to HealthVault within PowerShell, you can start using the utility from the command line and extract information ...