// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Is it safe to use consumer wearable devices for research?
Virginia Gewin is a freelance reporter in Portland, Oregon.
Search author on:
PubMed
Google Scholar
Wuyoh Sui, a researcher at Western University in London, Canada, explains some of the ethical considerations of using digital wearable technology in research.Credit: Anna Sui
Consumer wearables, such as smart watches or rings, can help people to track their daily steps, heart rate and sleep patterns. Given the devices’ popularity and ease of use, researchers are increasingly harnessing them to study health — for example, by investigating exercise regimes or monitoring chronic diseases.
Wuyoh Sui, a digital-health and behavioural-change researcher at Western University in London, Canada, has been studying how best to use digital technologies to improve peoples’ physical-activity levels and mental well-being. He has also been researching the accuracy, safety and effectiveness of these artificial-intelligence tools used to improve health behaviours, which often rely on ‘black box’ algorithms that make it hard to understand how inputs and outputs are created and handled.
Although wearables will undoubtedly provide more-tailored health interventions by using personalized data, Sui says there are many ethical concerns to navigate when using such commercial devices in research. The biggest two are data privacy (what data are used by the AI-based algorithms in these devices) and data security (who can potentially access those data). Risks include the sale, sharing and theft of sensitive metrics that reveal the daily habits and physical status of a person to advertisers, insurers and companies that sell personal information.
Sui spoke to Nature about how researchers can navigate the complex, shifting landscape of consumer wearables in scientific research.
Until 2019, my colleagues and I used conventional research-focused wearables such as inclinometers — devices that can be attached to a person’s thigh to determine whether they are sitting or standing. But these devices were expensive and required the wearer to shave their thigh and attach the inclinometer and a waterproof cover.
Will wearable technologies transform clinical trials?
We began to explore ways to collect step counts from the commercial health apps used by study participants. Our aim was to use those data in Pathverse, a digital platform created to deploy custom health interventions to participants. In separate work, we collected data from commercial virtual-reality headsets with built-in accelerometers to corroborate participant’s activity levels. But in both cases, we didn’t have a way to independently assess how these third-party apps determined the frequency and intensity of movement.