Blog 9 - The effective use of Sensor-generated measures of health

Our ninth blog post explains the importance of responsible sharing of data and open source data repositories to advance healthcare. Have your say!

Founded in 2019 as an industry collaboration to promote the effective use of high-quality, sensor-generated measures of health in clinical research, the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) is now evaluating a significant expansion of its vision and is calling out to the clinical research community – patient engagement groups, professional digital health societies, government agencies, academic institutions, health company representatives, and other interested parties to build consensus in its next steps.

Your Call to Action

Biomedical data is powerful tool on its own, but when it’s used collaboratively, for example combining data across multiple studies or reanalyzing study data with updated algorithms, it brings a whole new level of importance and relevance to its output. Clinical research demands higher quality data than most commonly available wearables can provide. Anyone from software developers to medical researchers can register algorithms related to digital medicine and publicly-available datasets from wearables and connected health technologies, even those with license restrictions, at www.owear.org as well as other open source repositories. Gathering access to the raw sensor data increases transparency across the board and is something that needs to be maintained and developed to support academics and industry alike.

Suggest the way forward?

The working group has come up with a few suggestions as to where the initiative could have the most impact, for example; continue as a community hub backing the developers, concentrate on a more open and robust database of open wearable data sets, benchmarking the accuracy of different algorithms or initiating broader validation efforts.

Wish to become a member of the working group? Contact us at www.owear.org