The Rise of Wearables
What do wearables in clinical trials look like?
Wearable devices are generally thought of as pieces of electronic equipment that can be worn as accessories and predominantly used to track an individual’s fitness performance e.g. Apple Watch, FitBit, Garmin and many more.
They track and provide real-time feedback and are a regular on many a gym-goer’s wrist. But now, their use has extended into clinical trials to track and analyse the variables being tested on each patient. 2017 saw the debut of the first FDA-approved pill2 with a packaged sensor for tracking patient usage.
Original wearables were glorified pedometers, now they have features and sensors on them that have actually seen them undergo varying levels of scrutiny by health organisations such as the FDA.
According to some figures, “the global wearable technology market size was valued at USD 40.65 billion in 20203 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8% from 2021 to 2028.”
With the use of wearable technology expanding into other remits, we can be certain that this market will continue to grow but in doing so, questions are being raised regarding the safety, collection and integrity of the data it is measuring.
The value of the global wearable technology market size in 2020
What’s caused this change in data collection?
It’s worth noting that this trend of mobile health is not just the use of wearables but also encompasses other areas such as remote patient monitoring and COVID-19 testing apps4.
Just as we saw with the increased adoption of decentralised clinical trials resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps this combination of digital transformation within clinical trials, the need to become easier for a patient to be involved and for trials to even remain operable during the pandemic caused the shift to this format of data collection and reporting.
It may even be the case that there is (or will be) a correlation between the increased use and acceptance of wearable devices gathering data within trials.
Do we need to be more wary of wearable technology?