Amy McDonough, Managing Director and General Manager at Fitbit health solutions at Google provided great insights today around how Fitbit devices are powering transformation in Health research.
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According to Amy’s note, to date, there are more than 900 studies using Fitbit devices. These studies range from diabetes, heart disease, obesity, mental health, cancer, post-surgery and more.
Some of the key ongoing efforts that were mentioned in her note today are the following:
- All of Us Research program in collaboration with Scripps Research is a landmark precision medicine study that has incorporated Fitbit wearables to enhance data resource and inform future research.
- Fitbit health solutions is also working in conjunction with UMass Memorial Health to help prevent and manage cardio metabolic diseases of employees.
- Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s BWEL breast cancer study is evaluating if weight loss can prevent breast cancer recurrence.
- University of Michigan researchers are using Fitbit devices to help study the mental health of interns.
- Fitbit also provide devices to Mayo Clinic to help study sleep and activity patterns in patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to understand the long-term effects of the illness.
Fitbit has also launched the Fitbit Heart Study last year to validate their Afib Algorithm. This virtual study has over 455,000 participants.
Premier medical journal, The Lancet Digital Health published a paper of Fitbit’s large-scale cross-sectional heart rate variability (HRV) study, which aimed to leverage wrist-worn tracking devices using photoplethysmography (PPG) to characterize HRV metrics to better understand variations by age, gender, time of day and physical activity level.
This study analyzed aggregated, de-identified data from 8 million individuals across 74 countries around the world, making it the largest known HRV dataset to date.
Lastly, the energized health solutions team has also been addressing the issue of health disparities.
To that end, they launched a program in conjunction with Fitabase, called Health Equity Research initiative, which is designed to help address health inequity in underserved populations. Fitbit is awarding up to $500,000 in Fitbit Products and Services to early career researchers who are working in this field.
Congratulations to the Fitbit team for some of these remarkable achievements. It is also important to point out that Fitbit’s design and engineering teams have been winning numerous much-coveted design awards for their products and service offerings.
- Fitbit continues to win several prestigious design awards
- Fitbit Inspire 2 wins 2021 Red Dot Design Award
Fitbit users can look forward to some very interesting and helpful initiatives coming their way under the leadership of Amy McDonough. If you haven’t taken advantage of the free Fitbit Premium trial that came with your device, you should definitely check it out.
You can read the details around Fitbit Health initiatives by checking out Amy’s latest post that was published today.
