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Forensic Insights: Analyzing and Visualizing Fitbit Cloud Data

<p dir="ltr">Wearable devices are ubiquitous. There are over 1.1 billion wearable devices in the<br>market today[1]. The market is projected to grow at a rate of 14.6% annually till 2030[2].<br>These devices collect and store a large amount of data[3]. A major amount of this collected<br>data is stored in the cloud. For many years now, law enforcement organizations have been<br>continuously encountering cases that involve a wearable device in some capacity. There have<br>also been examples of how these wearable devices have helped in crime investigations and<br>insurance fraud investigations [4],[5],[6],[7],[8]. The article [4] performs an analysis of 5 case<br>studies and 57 news articles and shows how the framing of wearables in the context of the<br>crimes helped those cases. However, there still isn’t enough awareness and understanding<br>among law enforcement agencies on leveraging the data collected by these devices to solve<br>crimes. Many of the fitness trackers and smartwatches in the market today have more or<br>less similar functionalities of tracking data on an individual’s fitness-related activities, heart<br>rate, sleep, temperature, and stress [9]. One of the major players in the smartwatch space is<br>Fitbit. Fitbit synchronizes the data that it collects, directly to Fitbit Cloud [10]. It provides<br>an Android app and a web dashboard for users to access some of these data, but not all.<br>Application developers on the other hand can make use of Fitbit APIs to use user’s data.<br>These APIs can also be leveraged by law enforcement agencies to aid in digital forensic<br>investigations. There have been previous studies where they have developed tools that make<br>use of Fitbit Web APIs [11],[12], [13] but for various other purposes, not for forensic research.<br>There are a few studies on the topic of using fitness tracker data for forensic investigations<br>[14],[15]. But very few have used the Fitbit developer APIs [16]. Thus this study aims to<br>propose a proof-of-concept platform that can be leveraged by law enforcement agencies to<br>access and view the data stored on the Fitbit cloud on a person of interest. The results<br>display data on 12 categories - activity, body, sleep, breathing, devices, friends, nutrition,<br>heart rate variability, ECG, temperature, oxygen level, and cardio data, in a tabular format<br>that is easily viewable and searchable. This data can be further utilized for various analyses.<br>The tool developed is Open Source and well documented, thus anyone can reproduce the<br>process.<br>12<br></p>

  1. 10.25394/pgs.24808371.v1
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/24808371
Date15 December 2023
CreatorsPoorvi Umesh Hegde (17635896)
Source SetsPurdue University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis
RightsCC BY 4.0
Relationhttps://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Forensic_Insights_Analyzing_and_Visualizing_Fitbit_Cloud_Data/24808371

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