On the Quality of Real-world Wearable Data in a Longitudinal Study of Information Workers

Over the past few years, an incredible diversity of consumer-grade wearables has emerged with tremendous breadth in capabilities, form factor, and cost. These wearable devices show significant promise for researchers to conduct expansive research studies in terms of scale, scope, and duration. Unfortunately, there is limited public data shared with respect to the data quality, device longevity, and scaling issues that emerge when trying to execute such studies. To that end, we share real-world results with respect to data quality, participant compliance, and device efficacy on a large scale, longitudinal study involving over seven hundred and fifty working professionals over the period of an entire year. In this paper, we present analyses with respect to the different types of data being collected including sleep, heart rate, physical activity, and stress. Furthermore, we explore participants behavior regarding charging frequency, and device robustness to further aid researchers considering large scale wearable studies.