Scripps Selects Fitbit as First Wearable Used in All of Us Program

Nov. 29, 2017
The National Institute of Health’s All of Us research program has selected Fitbit as the first wearable to be used in the initiative.

The National Institute of Health’s All of Us research program has selected Fitbit as the first wearable to be used in the initiative.

The project, established by the White House in 2015, has been funded by a supplement to a funding award from the NIH) to The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), based in La Jolla, Calif, and tasked with selecting patients to participate in the All of Us program.

All of Us seeks to enroll one million or more participants to accelerate research that may improve the ability to prevent and treat disease based on individual characteristics. Researchers will use data gathered from the program to learn more about how individual differences in lifestyle, environment and biological makeup can influence health and disease.

As a subset of the All of Us Research Program, the Scripps Translational Science Institute leads The Participant Center, a unit tasked with enrolling and engaging diverse populations across the country. Through this network, STSI will provide up to 10,000 Fitbit Charge 2 and Fitbit Alta HR devices to a representative sample of All of Us volunteers for a one-year study. At the end of the study, the researchers will provide recommendations on how the devices could be more broadly incorporated into the All of Us research program, according to officials.

What’s more, the study will aim to generate a data set that presents a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between health indicators such as physical activity, heart rate and sleep in conjunction with other critical health outcomes that will be captured as part of All of Us.

After evaluating consumer wearables in the market, the STSI team selected Fitbit based on its review of peer-reviewed validation studies and the fact that Fitbit devices are the most popular wearables in health research worldwide, said officials.

“The Fitbit devices selected track a combination of physical activity, sleep, and heart rate parameters,” Eric Topol, M.D., founder and director of STSI. “The popularity of Fitbit devices among millions of Americans, combined with their ease of use, including multi-day battery life and broad compatibility with smartphones, made Fitbit a natural choice for this pilot program.”

Noted Steven Steinhubl, M.D., cardiologist and director of digital medicine at STSI, “Most of what researchers know is based on intermittent snapshots of health in an artificial setting or based on personal recall. Through this research program, we’ll have access to comprehensive activity, heart rate and sleep data that may help us better understand the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and health outcomes and what that means for patients on an individualized basis.”

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