Health Data Exploration Survey Seeks Participants Who Self-Track Health

The Health Data Exploration project has announced a call for participants in an online survey that seeks to uncover insights into how individuals, companies and researchers are using the data that are captured through digital devices such as fitness apps. Another goal of the survey is to determine how willing individuals are to share their digitally captured health data with others for research purposes. This initiative - housed at the California Institute for Tele and Information Technology (Calit2) and supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) - will explore how new technologies like smartphones and digital apps are yielding an increasingly large amount of data that can be mined for insights into individual and population health and well-being. "The future of personal health and how healthcare will be provided is poised to be radically transformed by these new technologies," said Larry Smarr, director of Calit2 and a member of the Health Data Exploration (HDE) advisory board. "It's important to set the stage now for how this will happen so that researchers from disciplines ranging from computer science to systems biology to exercise science can contribute their best efforts to help make this happen." Self-tracking devices and other technologies that generate "digital footprints" now make it possible for individuals, patients, providers and researchers to generate and access an abundance of health-related data. Until now, no large-scale survey has been conducted to determine how supportive these populations are to opening up and sharing these data for purposes of research.