Crickles after Strava

Crickles and Strava

For Crickles, Strava has been a mixed blessing: on the one hand the Strava API has simplified the collection of activity data from our community of users; on the other hand, Strava’s view that any data so obtained belongs to them rather than to their users has stymied our ability to generate and share useful insights from it. In particular, Strava has instructed us not to publish a journal paper that we think may be potentially helpful to practitioners and researchers in athlete heart health. Now, Strava’s recent announcement that further restricts apps using their API makes it impossible for Crickles to provide any meaningful service using the API so from Wednesday the Crickles Navigator is coming down, at least temporarily.

Some background on the research side… The primary purpose of Crickles is to enable our users to quantify their aggregate cardiac stress through exercise and to compare this with levels from a cohort of peers. We created Crickles because we couldn’t find, and still haven’t seen, metrics on other platforms that do this well. In addition, we developed a simple method for identifying certain apparent irregularities in user heart rate data acquired from sports devices such as Garmin or Wahoo bike computers. Our simple irregularity measure has a very strong association (p-value ~ 0.0001) with a reported diagnosis of heart rhythm issues. Both our measure of cardiac stress and our irregularity flag reach beyond established science so around four years ago Mark – a senior cardiologist with an interest in sports cardiology – and I co-authored a paper on our methodology and findings in order to get them into the public domain for the scrutiny of others. If this holds up and can be replicated it could give endurance athletes a pre-symptomatic warning of some potential heart health issues they can take to a medical professional for proper screening. This does not require the athlete to wear a high-end watch with built-in cardiology features but can be taken from pretty much any sports device that accurately captures heart rate during exercise. (The Crickles cardiac stress score does not even require that!)

We approached Strava for their consent to publish our paper, as required by the terms of use of the Strava API. They gave us a robust No citing privacy concerns, even though we did not propose to publish any athlete-specific data or data from which any user could ever be identified. Strava told us that they did run partnerships with the scientific community on research projects and that we could apply to their program but when we asked for details on how to apply we never got a response.

Later, at our request, a team of post-graduate Mathematics students from Warwick University did an excellent research piece that explored a more sophisticated technique for irregularity detection. Sadly, their analysis and their ability to publish their findings were hamstrung by the inability to use any data obtained by Crickles through the Strava API, even with written user consent and when fully de-identified. We also ran other studies in conjunction with Warwick University’s post graduate students; while interesting, these were also frustratingly limited in scope for the same reason.

Strava have not mellowed nor have their increasing revenues – reported to be $275 million in 2023 – led them to relax their restrictions on ways in which apps using their API can bring value to users. On the contrary, last month Strava sent out an email with no prior notice to all app developers instructing us that a new, highly restrictive set of terms of use is now in force. This is well covered by DC Rainmaker here. This has a 30-day enforcement period cutting in on 11 December and from this date we will have to take Crickles down, at least for the time being.

Future Crickles

There is now no future for Crickles as a Strava-based app. I don’t know for sure yet whether obtaining user data equally easily from any other consolidating source will be feasible. Certainly, I don’t have the resources, or the interest or the funds, to develop direct connections to a range of sports devices. I am actively exploring an alternative but this takes time and I have to fit it in with my regular consultancy work. In the best case, we might have a Strava-free Crickles out by the new year; in the worst case, it won’t be viable.

Being released from the Strava API terms of use potentially offers new opportunities to conduct and publish the kind of research that Mark and I have wanted to do all along. Even if we cannot obtain user activity data through a seamless near real-time interface, we can try to find a relatively painless way to enable willing users to send us equivalent data offline. To this end, we will be in touch, and especially with a focus on those who have been kind enough to complete our short heart health survey over the past few years (we only need it once so if you’ve submitted it already we don’t need it again!).

As well as research, we might also consider providing customised analytics similar to that which Crickles now offers through the Navigator but personalised, although this would be more time-consuming and we would probably have to charge for it. If there is interest, we could even consider offering training on how to do this analysis yourself, but that would be a far more ambitious undertaking.

Whatever path we take, there is no future in which we will ever sell user data. If we need to raise cash to cover our costs, which we have not done historically, we’ll do it through a transparent direct charge. (And here, many thanks again to those of you who have made a voluntary contribution!)

Please do get in touch if you have any thoughts or suggestions about where, if anywhere, to take Crickles next.

Many thanks!

Ian