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