Establishing Linkages Between Distributed Survey Responses and Consumer Wearable Device Datasets: A Pilot Protocol

As technology increasingly becomes an integral part of everyday life, many individuals are choosing to use wearable technology such as activity trackers to monitor their daily physical activity and other health-related goals. Researchers would benefit from learning more about the health of these individuals remotely, without meeting face-to-face with participants and avoiding the high cost of providing consumer wearables to participants for the study duration.

The present study seeks to develop the methods to collect data remotely and establish a linkage between self-reported survey responses and consumer wearable device biometric data, ultimately producing a de-identified and linked dataset. Establishing an effective protocol will allow for future studies of large-scale deployment and participant management.

A total of 30 participants who use a Fitbit will be recruited on Mechanical Turk Prime and asked to complete a short online self-administered questionnaire. They will also be asked to connect their personal Fitbit activity tracker to an online third-party software system, called Fitabase, which will allow access to 1 month's retrospective data and 1 month's prospective data, both from the date of consent.

The protocol will be used to create and refine methods to establish linkages between remotely sourced and de-identified survey responses on health status and consumer wearable device data.

The refinement of the protocol will inform collection and linkage of similar datasets at scale, enabling the integration of consumer wearable device data collection in cross-sectional and prospective cohort studies.