Wearables in sports and health
© shutterstock - Kaspars Grinvalds
So-called wearables – sensor systems such as smartwatches, fitness wristbands, VR glasses, and even rings or other accessories worn on the body – are being used to an increasing extent in everyday life to monitor, evaluate, and improve human behavior and health. These devices contain numerous sensors and software programs that claim to enable parameters to be constantly collected such as step count, heart rate, sleep patterns, performance capacity, and even states of mood. Systems such as these are now also increasingly being used in (high-performance) sports during training and competition to record performance-relevant kinematic and kinetic parameters. Wearables are also ushering in a new era in various scientific fields, as they are usually cost-effective and comfortable to wear and thus prove highly popular among potential subjects.
For all their potential, however, the rapid pace of technological progress, the complex nature of these devices, and the mostly inaccessible algorithms of the manufacturers raise questions as to the validity and reliability of these systems and data. To ensure accuracy, initiatives are emerging both within Germany and on an international scale to develop standards for sports and fitness wearables in view of the growing quality requirements placed on wearables. The German Society of Sport Science (dvs), for example, has established a working group to focus on this topic.
Nevertheless, academic research is finding it difficult to keep pace with the more agile commercial ecosystem: Primary studies are hindered by the need to secure funding, develop validation protocols, recruit and test participants, and carry out the peer review process. Systematic overviews and meta-analyses are often already outdated by the time they are published: Commercial companies typically launch new hardware on the market every year and publish several software updates annually; this far outpaces the academic validation and synthesis cycle.
It is therefore necessary to establish a network of relevant individuals from the fields of science, industry, and applications that would compile and process relevant questions and issues in an ongoing procedure and put this knowledge into practice. With this objective in mind, the Ladenburg Roundtable could provide the impetus for representatives of the above-mentioned groups to come together to initiate an exchange forum and launch the first specific measures. On the basis of the activities of the German Society of Sport Science’s “Inertial Sensors” working group, the Ladenburg Roundtable should serve to achieve the following goals:
- prepare an initial position paper with guidelines for scientific studies,
- initiate a Delphi process and devise initial systematizations for data collection, and
- establish a network from the fields of science, industry, and applications, identify opportunities for joint development, and facilitate an open discourse.
- Dr. Marcus Schmidt, Institute for Sport and Sport Science, Technical University of Dortmund