The general hoopla around mobile health technology has died down somewhat in recent years as the various challenges surrounding getting the tech to market have become clearer.  Nonetheless, a recent study from the University of Michigan highlights the potential that still clearly exists.

The study shows that wearable technologies, such as the Apple Watch, are supporting medical researchers in recruiting a far more diverse pool of participants for their studies, which in turn makes them more effective in helping us to understand underlying health conditions.

User’s health

The research involved around 7,000 volunteers, each of whom wore an Apple Watch for over 15 hours per day.  Collectively they generated over 200 million heart rate measurements and 1.1 million blood pressure readings.  The researchers focused on the first 90 days of the study, where the above readings were collected alongside activity data from either the Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a wireless blood pressure cuff.

The analysis revealed that male participants over 65 had significantly lower resting heart rates both at rest and while walking, with women 3 beats per minute higher than men on average.  When assessed according to race, Black participants had the highest heart rates, with their white peers having the lowest.

The researchers believe that the results illustrate the importance of patient-specific context when clinicians interpret the data gleaned from wearable devices.

Plugging gaps

One of the most important aspects of the research was the ability of the researchers to recruit participants from normally underrepresented groups for the digital health research.  For instance, they highlight that 17% of the participants were Black and another 17% Asian.

The wearable devices also allowed the researchers to gather data over an extended period of time, with this particular study capturing data over 90 days, which the researchers believe provides a more accurate and representative sample of the long-term experiences of the participants.

“With this tool, researchers and participants can choose certain clinical and demographic criteria—age, body mass index, sex—and see not only how many participants fall into that cohort but their average resting heart rate, blood pressure and other activity data,” the researchers say. “It provides more context in the form of normative data for researchers.”

The researchers hope that the three-year follow-up period will be vital in helping them to contextualize the data they’re gathering from the Apple Watch alongside that from the electronic medical records and ongoing survey data for each volunteer.  It may even provide some interesting insights into the impact of Covid-19.

“We have data on participants both before and after the onset of the pandemic, so we really have the capability to evaluate how physiologic parameters changed over the course of the pandemic both as a result of illness but also due the global impact the pandemic has had on all of our lifestyles,” the researchers conclude.