At a new National Institutes of Health-funded center at the University of Memphis (Tenn.), researchers are working on software solutions to help healthcare providers and others better analyze and use data collected by wearable devices.
The Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge aims to develop an open-source platform and then demonstrate its feasibility in two wearables-based pilot projects, one to keep former smokers from relapsing and one to reduce readmissions among congestive heart failure patients.
Santosh Kumar, PhD, one of the university's computer science professors and the director of the new center, says it's currently difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from sensor- and user-generated data. "The data is not collected from a hospital, and no one is making sure sensors are working properly…and yet we're supposed to make health decisions," Dr. Kumar said in a Wall Street Journal report. The new software platform will "combine and contextualize" the data to help hospitals and other benefits reap the currently latent benefits of sensor data, according to the report.
More articles on wearables:
Stanford launches mHealth research center
Survey: Despite privacy concerns, consumers see benefit of HealthKit, other data aggregators
Fitbit will not integrate with HealthKit