Fitbit device selected to monitor health of 10k Americans

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDNov 7 2017

The national All of Us Research Program established by the White House in 2015 has selected Fitbit as the first wearable device that would provide information regarding the health of the Americans.

President Barack Obama at the time had begun this program called the Precision Medicine Initiative which has since then been renamed as “All of Us”. The huge project All of Us, is funded by a supplement to a funding award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI).

All of Us would enroll over one million participants in the study to improve the research that could help predict the general health of the public as well as devise strategies that could prevent disease on the basis of individual characteristics. Every individual moves differently during their regular days and there are other lifestyle parameters that are different and varied in the population. The study would assess how environment, lifestyle and biology alters the health and disease in the large populations.

The Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) leads The Participant Center. The Participant Centre would enroll a diverse population nationwide. STSI would be giving out 10,000 Fitbit Charge 2 and Fitbit Alta HR devices to the All of Us volunteers in the year long study. This is a subset of the main All of Us program. At the end of the year the researchers would provide their own advisory reports on how the devices could be improved to obtain better information.

The study would also check for associations between several physical indicators such as heart rate, physical activity and sleep and health outcomes and emergencies. Adam Pellegrini, general manager of Fitbit Health Solutions said wearable data can provide information that leads to “highly personalized healthcare”. This is part of the “global shift towards precision medicine” he said. He added that this is a “historic initiative” through which the role of Fitbit can be seen in individualization for better health and prevention of disease.

He explained that the first part of the project would check how these wearables can be used for population health. He said that at present there are 11 million members in the company's health social network page that started March last year.

The researchers say that Fitbit has been backed by several studies and is one of the most popular health wearables in health research globally. Eric Topol, founder and director of STSI said that the devices record sleep, physical activity and heart rate. Millions of Americans use them because of their ease of use, compatibility with smart phones and long battery life that spans over days he said. These features make “Fitbit a natural choice for this pilot program”, he added.