Case study: Fitbit

Fitbit are a leading global wearables brand, providing technology to help people live healthier lives. One of the ways that they are achieving this in the UK is by supporting events such as Sport Relief and adidas City Runs with participation challenges for users of their devices.

The events that Fitbit create and support are designed to drive awareness of the brand and encourage community participation by making daily activity fun. Using their activity trackers to capture user’s data, activity such as total steps and distance is captured, aggregated and distributed via event-specific media.

For each event, the requirement was to provide webbased platforms that would facilitate participant registration & authentication, link to Fitbit’s core infrastructure via its public API and provide near realtime and historical activity updates to the general public and participants.

In all cases, timescales were tight and scalability requirements were extreme. For Fitbit’s Big Billion Stepa-thon for Sport Relief the requirement was to serve over 5 million page views at launch and process participant registrations before gathering step data for 5 billion steps that counted towards the overall objective.

After each event, Fitbit need to be able to measure its success and deliver results to the participants and wider marketplace in order to promote the event itself and Fitbit’s involvement.

Fitbit selected KLOC Digital Solutions as its UK development partner to deliver its challenge platforms for Sport Relief 2016, Parkrun, Fitbit 50 and Royal Parks half Marathon and adidas City Runs.

KLOC elected to build a suite of hardware and software infrastructure that was designed with unlimited ability to scale-out. KLOC combined bespoke code with the Fitbit API to produce a front-end web CMS and back-end step counting and data analysis platform.

The solution developed by KLOC was able to meet all Fitbit’s requirements, supporting unpredictable traffic volume and meeting reporting needs.

Breaking down each deliverable element into selfcontained sub-systems meant work could be divided up into multiple streams. This ensured that hardware could be added as required and fluctuations in traffic could be dealt with efficiently.

By combining bespoke code with Fitbit’s API, KLOC were able to provide all the facilities and information required by the participants and event administrators.

Due to the approach taken, KLOC successfully delivered and ran each of the Fitbit challenges with 100% success.