NOVEMBER - 20228WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY : BOON OR BANEShraddha Bhatia, Clinical Director, Physical Therapist, Board-Certified Orthopedic Specialist, Mount Sinai Health SystemByGlobal end-user spending on wearable technology is expected to amount to roughly 90 billion USD by 2022; which means that the odds of you reading this article with a wearable device on are pretty high.Scientists verify usability of instruments by determining their validity, reliability, and accuracy. Validity being the extent to which the instrument used in a given experiment measures exactly what it is meant to measure. Reliability being the extent at which the outcomes are consistent each time the experiment is repeated. I once heard a researcher claim that it takes roughly ten years for a medical device to go from conception to execution because of how rigorous standardization and testing in healthcare is. Although wearable devices routinely used in the general population now claim to measure physiological data, did you know that they do not undergo exhaustive testing procedures? Not only because of the tremendous challenges, the sheer tedium or high stakes but because of lack of standardization.INTERLIVE (The Towards Intelligent Health and Well-Being Network of Physical Activity Assessment) a consortium of six European universities and one industrial partner, founded in 2019, identified this void in smartphone and wearable technology validation protocols. The group recognized that while the acceptance of such technology is high, validity of these devices hasn't been transparently evaluated. They recently released an expert statement in the British Journal of Sports Medicine with a best-practice consumer wearable and smartphone `step counter' validation protocol. As a next step, INTERLIVE plans to provide best-practice recommendations for validation of wearable and smartphone based energy expenditure (EE) and maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) estimations.They argue that since there is no standardized validation protocol for wearable devices or gold standard of measurement to compare against, there is hardly any means for consumers or interested stakeholders to judge if these devices perform satisfactorily and with low measurement errors. In a 2018 study published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, heart rate(HR) measurements from eight wearable activity monitors was compared during In My Opinion
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