Published on Authors of this article:. Background: Wearable devices hold great promise, particularly for data generation for cutting-edge health research, and their demand has risen substantially in recent years. However, there is a shortage of aggregated insights into how wearables have been used in health research. Objective: In this review, we aim to broadly overview and categorize the current research conducted with affordable wearable devices for health research. Studies were eligible if they used noninvasive wearables: worn on the wrist, arm, hip, and chest; measured vital signs; and analyzed the collected data quantitatively.
Results: We included studies using wearable devices covering 10,, participants. Conclusions: Wearables showed an increasingly diverse field of application such as COVID prediction, fertility tracking, heat-related illness, drug effects, and psychological interventions; they also included underrepresented populations, such as individuals with rare diseases. There is a lack of research on wearable devices in low-resource contexts. Fueled by the COVID pandemic, we see a shift toward more large-sized, web-based studies where wearables increased insights into the developing pandemic, including forecasting models and the effects of the pandemic.
Some studies have indicated that big data extracted from wearables may potentially transform the understanding of population health dynamics and the ability to forecast health trends. Wearable devices hold great promise, particularly for data generation for cutting-edge health research, and their demand has risen considerably in the last few years [ 1 - 3 ].
Noninvasive, consumer-grade wearables hereafter wearables may provide manifold advantages for health research; they are generally unobtrusive, less expensive than gold standard research devices [ 4 ], comfortable to wear [ 5 ], and affordable for consumers [ 6 ]. In recent years, the quality and accuracy of wearables have improved [ 7 , 8 ], resulting in more clinically approved certifications [ 9 ].
Wearables can measure long-term data in the naturalistic environment of study participants, allowing for ecologic momentary assessments [ 10 , 11 ]. Therefore, wearables are valuable developments, particularly for generating data for health research in large study populations, that is, global health or epidemiological studies, or in low-income contexts [ 6 , 9 , 12 ].
