A More Detailed Explanation REST APIs using humanAPI as the Example

To gain a high level understanding of this approach well use a simple example of obtaining
blood pressure readings for a particular patient from humanAPI, a site that aggregates patient
generated data and makes it available using REST. There are three available REST GET
commands as shown here:

To support privacy humanAPI provides a service called Human Connect to authenticate users'
and allow them to authorize sharing from their health data from all available sources. This
ultimately results in an access token that can be used to obtain the desired data, as shown
here to obtain a list of blood pressure readings for a user:
https://api.humanapi.co/v1/human/blood_pressure/readings?access_token=a99f3b377fb7b2f
b0cb362ce7affd7f2d51e864a
Even a non-technical reader should be able to figure out that this command is for a patients
glucose pressure readings. Each entry in the list of results would look something like this:

{"id":"53d2b2ced651ab7719003aa3","userId":"52e20cb2fff56aac62000001","timestamp":"20140725T21:22:30.000Z","systolic":122,"diastolic":76,"unit":"mmHg","heartRate":81,"source":"ih
ealth","createdAt":"2014-07-25T19:41:02.637Z","updatedAt":"2014-07-25T19:41:02.637Z"}

Again, even a non-technical reader should be able to determine that this reading is 122/76 with
a pulse of 81.
Heres the format for the entire string of results shown above:

Property

Type

Description

id

String

The id of the blood glucose reading

userId

String

The global Id of the user

timestamp

Date

The original date and time of the measurement

source

String

The source service for the measurement, where it was created

value

Number

The value of the measurement in the unit specified

unit

String

The unit of the measurement value

createdAt

Date

The time the measurement was created on the Human API server

updatedAt

Date

The time the measurement was updated on the Human API server

Note that the results identify the source of the data. In this case it is iHealth, an iPhone based
blood pressure device shown here.