PulsHealth
Open source · Apache-2.0

Own
your health data

PulsHealth syncs Apple Health to a backend you run yourself. The iOS app, the server stack and the wire protocol are all open source — and nothing is hosted by us, because there is nothing to host.

View on GitHubAbout the App

The app is free on the App Store — or build it from source with Xcode. Either way it needs a server of your own to sync to.

What Is in the Project

Apple Health holds years of your data behind an API that only apps can read. PulsHealth gets it into a database you own — and everything needed to do that is in one repository.

iOS App
Reads Apple Health — read-only, it never writes back — and streams every sample to your server. A full historical backfill first, then continuous near-real-time updates. Around 80 HealthKit types, workouts with GPS routes, and activity rings.
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Reference Server
A Docker Compose stack you run yourself: PostgreSQL 17 with TimescaleDB, a Go ingest API, a read-only product API, provisioned Grafana dashboards, and a web viewer. One command to bring it up.
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Open Wire Protocol
The Puls Sync Protocol v1 is specified, not just implemented: gzip NDJSON over HTTPS, a JSON Schema for every line type, canonical units, a fixture corpus, and a minimal Python receiver. Write your own backend if you would rather.
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MCP Server for AI
A read-only MCP server over the product API, so Claude, Claude Code, or Cursor can answer questions from your own health data — daily metrics, rings, workouts, sleep. ChatGPT connects through the API's OpenAPI document.
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Why Self-Hosted?

Health data is about as personal as data gets. The safest place to put it is a machine you control.

Your Server, Your Data

There is no PulsHealth service and no PulsHealth account. The app posts to the one URL you enter and nowhere else, so the developer never receives your health data — there is nothing for it to be sent to.

Readable, Not Locked In

Data lands in plain PostgreSQL you can query with SQL, chart in Grafana, or pull down as CSV and JSONL. The wire format is documented, so a backend of your own is a supported path rather than a hack.

Auditable by Design

App, sync library, server stack, protocol and dashboards are all in one Apache-2.0 repository. Every privacy claim on this site is something you can check against the source rather than take on trust.

Reference Material

Background reading on the metrics themselves, kept separately from the software.

Knowledge Base
What each Apple Health metric actually measures — sampling behaviour, typical ranges, and how devices differ.
Blog
Longer write-ups on health data, wearables, and the engineering behind moving it around.

Start with the server

The app has nowhere to sync until a backend exists, so bring one up first. The bootstrap script generates every secret, starts the stack, and prints a pairing code for the phone.

git clone https://github.com/PulsHealth/pulshealth.git
cd pulshealth
scripts/bootstrap.sh --time-zone Europe/Berlin
Read the Docs on GitHubThe Self-Hosted Stack

Follow the project

An occasional email when there is a release, news about the app, or a change to the sync protocol or the server stack. Your name and address, nothing more.