Case Study: Active for Good achieves a scalable IoT platform converting calories into life-saving food with Heroku

IoT Platform on Heroku "Recycles Calories" to Fight Severe Malnutrition and Childhood Obesity

Active for Good is a nonprofit health startup that motivates kids and adults in the U.S. to turn calories burned through physical activity into funding for Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition. They faced the challenge of aggregating calorie data from wristbands, mobile apps and third‑party trackers, while building a scalable, data‑intensive IoT platform that a distributed, global development team could rapidly iterate on.

Active for Good built the platform on Heroku—running 14 apps on the Common Runtime, integrating devices and services like Fitbit and Jawbone, and migrating to Heroku Postgres for better data handling. Using Heroku add‑ons (SSL, CloudAMQP, Librato, Scheduler) and CI/CD with GitHub and Codeship, they achieved rapid app provisioning, reliable production operations for a remote team, and a scalable infrastructure that converts participant activity into funds for life‑saving therapeutic food, enabling the organization to grow its impact.

Active for Good

Dan Byler

Product Manager