Smartphones and Wearables

What do we mean by ‘smartphone and wearable data’?

Smartphone and wearable data are collected by wearable devices, such as health-tracking mobile smartphone apps and fitness watches, and can also be known as ‘personal monitoring data’. This data can be separated into two types, active and passive: passive data is data that is collected by a wearable or phone app without the wearer having to input any information, e.g. steps per day. Active data requires the wearer to input information, e.g. answering questions to calculate a quality-of-life score.

Professor Tim Chico is the Theme Lead for Smartphones and Wearables.

Why is ‘smartphone and wearable data’ important for cardiovascular disease research?

Smartphones and wearables collect a wide range of data relevant to health, including measures of activity, behaviour, and body measurements, such as heart rate. If this data was available and linked to other existing health information, such as an individual’s medical records or scans, it could provide a better picture of how cardiovascular diseases develop. This would enable doctors to monitor and manage an individual’s condition more effectively.

The use of smartphone and wearable data in research will require public participation. Developing and maintaining public trust will be essential to this. We are therefore prioritising public and patient involvement and engagement in this work from the outset.

What are we doing?

We want to improve cardiovascular health by leading and supporting research that securely and fairly uses smartphone and wearable data linked to health records.

Priority setting

As part of our initial work to investigate how the use of data from wearable devices could transform our understanding of cardiovascular disease, we organised a workshop in 2021 that brought together over 70 representatives from key stakeholder groups.

The workshop explored the unique opportunities that wearables present, along with challenges, such as data privacy, creating a representative dataset and health inequalities. The workshop highlighted the importance of developing studies that patients and the public value and trust, and technologies that they want and are able to use. Insights from this workshop contributed to a viewpoint article Charting a Course for Smartphones and Wearables to Transform Population Health Research.

Identifying the most important smartphone and wearable data

To identify smartphone and wearable data that are important for research to improve cardiovascular health and acceptable for sharing by the public we carried out two surveys; 1. asking researchers and health care professionals to rate each type of data by importance, and 2. asking members of the public how they would feel about sharing each type of data.

The most important smartphone and wearable data identified by researchers for cardiovascular research included heart rate, heart rhythm, activity, and sleep. Over 75% of the public said they would be in favour of sharing these most important types of data.

This study was codesigned with a group of public and patient representatives, who placed particular importance on ensuring the language in the public survey was accessible and understandable, and that the survey had broad reach across the UK population.

This list of smartphone and wearable data can serve as a starting point for the creation of a large-scale dataset for cardiovascular research. We are now exploring the next steps towards making this vision a reality.

Public webinar

In 2022, we hosted a public webinar to engage the public in questions around the logistics and ethics of using wearables to help detect heart conditions. The interactive webinar – entitled ‘Could your smartphone help detect heart disease?’ – was led by Tim Chico, alongside our Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement manager, Samaira Khan, and members of our PPIE group, Helen Grice and Anwar Gariban. You can watch the webinar here.

A report of the webinar, including responses to the interactive Q&A session, reflections, and an overview of the work in this area can be read here.