Tag: evaluation

Digital Health Technology Reviews

Posted on by personalsensing

With the rapid evolution of mobile sensing and computing technology, we have seen a surge in the amount of technology readily available at our fingertips. This has resulted in a surge in the number of companies producing both consumer and healthcare facing digitally enabled technologies.

These technologies span a wide range of use-cases; ranging from fitness and wellness, all the way through to healthcare.  Over the past decade, the world of human performance and behaviour measurement technology has rapidly moved forwards; starting with iconic wearables such as the Nike+, Fitbit and Google Glass. Since 2014, dubbed “The year of Wearable Technology” by some, we have seen a huge growth in the popularity of consumer wearable tech, with the introduction of the Apple Watch forcing numerous competitors to jump on the bandwagon.

With this, it is expected that the number of connected wearables will increase from 325 million in 2016 to 929 million by 20211, with the digital health consumer base expected to grow in parallel2.

While the increased availability of such devices has the potential for many positive outcomes in the spaces of health and fitness research and Digital Health, it also has the potential to result in huge confusion about what technologies are fit-for-purpose.

For example, the requirements of a piece of tech that simply need to detect the number of steps a recreational athlete takes during the day are massively different to the requirements needed if the user needs to detect if an individual has atrial fibrillation.

This led members of our research group and the Applied Research for Connected Health centre to develop a structured evaluation framework.

This framework allows for the:

“refining [of] the requirements for a specific application, and then evaluating the available devices against those requirements”

Over the coming year, members of our research group at the Insight Centre will leverage this framework to evaluate human performance measurement technologies, making these objective evaluations available online in the form of a blog post!

The structure of these blog posts will evolve over time, and will vary from evaluation-to-evaluation but will broadly focus on components of the evaluation framework.

A rough structure will be as follows:

  • What is the technology and what does it do?
  • Who makes the technology?
  • How much does it cost and where can I buy it?
  • What is the science behind the technology?
  • What happens to the data and can I access it?
  • What are the human factors associated with the technology?
  • Has it, or is it being used in any clinical trials?

1. Statista. Connected wearable devices worldwide 2016-2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/487291/global-connected-wearable-devices/ (2018).

2. Berg Insights. mHealth and Home Monitoring – 8th Edition (Gothenburg, Sweden: Berg Insight, 2017).

3. Caulfield, B., Reginatto, B. and Slevin, P., 2019. Not all sensors are created equal: a framework for evaluating human performance measurement technologies. npj Digital Medicine, 2(1), p.7. 3.

Personal Sensing – What do we do?

Posted on by personalsensing

Recent years have provided us with unprecedented access to a wide range of inexpensive sensing, aggregation and communication technologies that can transform society through provision of access to data relating to human behaviour and performance in health and sport.  However, this ever-advancing sensor web needs to be carefully matched to relevant data analytics and domain expertise to unlock the inherent value in the complex datasets that it produces. 

This research strand brings together expertise from life and clinical sciences, material science, computer science, and biomedical engineering to enhance the application of the sensor web to challenges in connected health and sport.  Whether dealing with chronic disease or performance enhancement in elite sport, a connected ecosystem is dependent on an efficient and unobtrusive approach to sensing, sharing and analyzing data to facilitate timely delivery of accurate information to all stakeholders in the process. 

In this strand of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics, a research centre spanning Dublin City University, NUI Galway, University College Cork, University College Dublin and other partner institutions, we address fundamental research activities related to optimizing the sensing, measurement and understanding of human behaviour and performance, and the implementation of feedback strategies that are designed to enhance it.  A further aim is to contribute to the expansion of sensing capabilities of the sensor web through development and validation of novel sensing technologies.

O’Brien Centre for Science, University College Dublin, Ireland

As part of our research, the personal sensing team in University College Dublin also conduct regular structured evaluations of health and wellness technology which are currently available on the market, with the view to keeping up-to-date with recent advances in the field, as well as ensuring that the technology which we may implement in our research is fit-for-purpose.

Over the coming months, we will be making our objective and structured reviews, conducted in accordance with the evaluation framework published in Nature Digital Medicine (Caulfield et al., 2019), available online through this blog post.

You can also follow us on twitter: @personalsensing, or contact us through this blog.

Visit the Insight Centre webpage for more details on what we do

Caulfield, B., Reginatto, B. and Slevin, P., 2019. Not all sensors are created equal: a framework for evaluating human performance measurement technologies. npj Digital Medicine, 2(1), p.7.