How to connect a Fitbit with your smart home

There is a way to integrate your Fitbit with your smart home using a system called if-this-then-that (IFTTT). IFTTT and a smart home set-up can help you to make your life easier by automating certain tasks.

Essential reading: Choosing the right Fitbit tracker

Before starting, it is important to give a brief overview of what IFTTT can do. Created about ten years ago this is a free web-based service that people use to create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web connected services. Users of the system create about 20 million “recipes” each day.

IFTTT can automate web-application tasks, such as posting the same content on several social networks. But it can go even further. Did you know that you can connect the smart device strapped to your wrist or a smart scale sitting in your bathroom to a smart home network? Some pretty cool stuff can be done via this connection.

A fitness tracker or smartwatch knowns when you are moving around and Fitbit is no different. This data can in turn be used to trigger certain actions.

For example, in the morning your smart home could sense that you are waking up and automatically get the coffee machine running. Or how about automatically turning on all the lights in your house when you wake up, or having them switch off automatically when you fall asleep? Remember, this is all done without you lifting a finger.

Your Fitbit essentially acts a sensor that other smart devices can tap into, to let them know when to act. There are many other interesting things you can do and applets you can install.

This includes triggering a notification to go to bed early when your Fitbit notices low sleep levels, saving your weekly sleep logs to a Google Spreadsheet, reminding yourself to get coffee if you didn’t get enough kip time, changing the temperature at night and much, much more. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.

It is not overly complicated to create your own IFTTT setup, and it’s even easier to download ready-made applets. The ones in the picture above are just a small example of what is available. To get started, head over to the IFTTT website and follow instructions on how to integrate your Fitbit with your smart home.

There are also platforms such as Wink, a smart home hub, that make this easier by integrating with Fitbit automatically to add it to your internet-of-things setup. The Hub helps different smart products speak the same wireless language so that you can easily control them.

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