The growing armada of health-related apps and wearable devices promise to transform the healthcare landscape, but it seems this will only really unfold if they all manage to work together, especially in areas such as data.

One such initiative is the Open Wearables Initiative, which is a collaboration designed to promote the effective use of high-quality, sensor-generated measures of health in clinical research through the open sharing of algorithms and data sets.

The initiative, which launched in 2019, is now accepting data and open source software from the wearables community.  The consortium has also expanded its working group to include representatives from four major pharma companies and clinical research organizations.

Wearables, ingestible sensors and other in-home monitoring devices promise to provide real-time monitoring of the health of individuals.  Their potential in healthcare is considerable, therefore, but there is an issue over the lack of accepted endpoints that has prevented these technologies being used in clinical trials.  OWEAR is working with researchers from across industry and academia to develop such endpoints.

A community hub

The platform aims to be a community hub that allows for the distribution and benchmarking of algorithms in an open and transparent manner, which will hopefully assist the best algorithms in their rise to the top.

Eventually this will enable a searchable database of algorithms, each benchmarked and with the source code freely available for use.  The team believe this will help to streamline drug development and empower a range of digital medical innovations.

They will work with software repositories, such as GitHub and Synapse, with OWEAR specializing in aggregating the resources and collecting the metadata into a searchable index to help healthcare researchers access the algorithms and software for their specific project.

They hope that the recognition and profile gained from registering algorithms and datasets with OWEAR will encourage developers to contribute.  The platform aims to enhance the visibility of software among the clinical research communities in both academia and industry, which will hopefully result in collaboration opportunities.