Your Whoop says recovery 72%. What does that actually mean?
When your fitness app shows "Recovery Score: 72", do you know how it got that number?
With Whoop, Oura, Fitbit you don't. Black box. Can't audit it, can't tune it, can't verify it works for your users.
And it matters more than you'd think:
An algorithm tuned for 25-year-old athletes gives bad scores to 65-year-old cardiac rehab patients
Sleep scores built for monophasic sleepers break for shift workers
HRV baselines vary wildly between populations
With Open Wearables every algorithm is open. Read the code. Fork it. Adjust thresholds for your specific users. Building for clinical? Your medical team can verify every line.
Should health algorithms be auditable by default? Curious what you all think.
We launched on Product Hunt today. If you think open health scoring matters, support us with an upvote:
Replies
For me, this is exactly the problem with most wearables. I rely on them daily, but I’ve never been able to understand or question how my recovery score is calculated.
Health scores shape behavior, so black-box algorithms shouldn’t be treated as unquestionable truth especially in sensitive or clinical contexts. If users are making decisions from those numbers, auditability and context should be standard, not optional.
Open Wearables
@assi_mahmood Completely agree, and this is the argument that resonates most with clinical teams. A score that influences a recovery plan or training load needs to be explainable, not just accurate. That's why every algorithm in OW can be audited, forked, and tuned, and why we built HIPAA-ready architecture from the start.