Integrations

Two ways to get numbers out of Helsa and into your home automation.

	Best when	Cost
MQTT with Home Assistant discovery	You already run an MQTT broker	Home Assistant creates the entities itself; nothing to maintain on either side
REST polling	You do not want a broker	Hand-written YAML, no discovery, and you own the polling schedule

MQTT is the recommended path, not because it is prettier but because it creates no maintenance debt: the discovery protocol is stable, and there is no custom integration to keep in step with Home Assistant releases. A bespoke HACS integration would be a nicer experience and a permanent obligation.

The MQTT publisher ships inside the ingestion worker and is off until you set HELSA_MQTT_URL. Nothing about running Helsa requires a broker; if you do not set one, no MQTT code ever runs.

One rule that governs both

Daily summaries go out. Raw samples do not.

A single day of an actively worn Apple Watch is 5,000–15,000 samples. Pushing those into Home Assistant would write tens of thousands of state changes a day into the recorder database, which is SQLite by default. The database bloats, the history graphs become unusable, purges take longer than the interval between them, and eventually the whole instance slows down — for data you will never look at in Home Assistant anyway.

Home Assistant is an automation surface, not a health data store. The health data store is the TimescaleDB behind Helsa, which is built for exactly this shape of data and compresses it.

So: a handful of daily numbers — steps, active energy, sleep duration, resting heart rate — updated a few times a day. If you want the detail, query the database or use GET /v1/samples.

What is worth sending

Entity	Update rate	Useful for
Daily steps	A few times a day	Dashboards, a nudge in the evening
Daily active energy	A few times a day	Same
Last night’s sleep duration	Once a morning	Morning routines, lighting
Resting heart rate	Once a day	A long-term graph
Rings closed	Once a day	A “day complete” indicator
Sync freshness	Every 15 minutes	The one alert that matters — see below

What is not worth sending

• Per-minute heart rate. Use the database.
• Individual workouts as entities. An event or a notification, maybe; an entity per workout, no.
• Anything you would not want in a second database with a different backup story.

Note

Whatever you publish leaves Helsa’s boundary. Home Assistant has its own database, its own backups, and possibly its own remote access. Daily aggregates are usually fine to keep there; think before you add anything more sensitive.