Selecting a Device
Which device is the best for health researchers? This video covers important considerations when selecting a device for your study.
- Which device is the best for health researchers? The highest quality device?.. Is it the most expensive brand? The brand that’s most widely used?
- Well, it’s neither. Rather than think of it by brand, we recommend selecting your device by considering the following aspects:
- Participants
- Metrics
- Battery life
- Budget
- Accompanying software
- Participants
- When thinking about which device to use, it's important to consider your participants' background.
- For example, if your participants have limited mobility, going with a chest strap instead of a ring or a smartwatch may be a challenge.
- If you’re interested in using a smartwatch specifically, and your participants have vision impairment issues, selecting a watch with a larger watch face may be a necessity.
- Metrics
- Not all brands of consumer wearables collect the same types of data, and not all devices within the same brand collect the same metrics either.
- Even when they do, that doesn’t mean that the devices within a brand collect the same data at the same level of accuracy or quality.
- Different devices within the same brand may have different types of sensors in the watches, or different generations of the same sensor.
- A general rule of thumb here is:
- The more recent the release of that device, the better quality the data will be. A smartwatch released in 2021 will most likely have a superior sensor than one released in 2016.
- That being said, we suggest looking at validation studies comparing different devices for the specific metric that you want to collect.
- Some devices may be extremely accurate for certain metrics, but have a wider margin of error for others.
- Finally, while it may be tempting to collect all of the metrics available on a device, there may be some consequences on participant experience.
- For example, larger amounts of data collected can have a significant impact on battery life.
- Which leads us to our next point:
- Battery Life
- The majority of smart watches on the market have a battery life of about 3-7 days.
- There are devices, however, that can run anywhere from a few weeks without charging, to 6 months.
- This can be extremely beneficial if your participants are away from the city and may not have stable access to electricity, for example, or if you do not want to task them with charging their devices regularly.
- Budget
- We can’t talk about device choice without talking about the cost. Every study will have a budget- unfortunately, and wearable devices can range dramatically in price.
- The good news is that the price of a consumer wearable does not directly affect quality where a health researcher is concerned.
- For example, the Garmin Vivosmart 4 runs at 130 USD - a very reasonable cost, especially when compared to medical devices or even other consumer wearables- and is able to collect sophisticated metrics such as interbeat interval data with a PPG sensor, allowing researchers to capture each individual heartbeat.
- And finally, the A of our acronym:
- Accompanying software
- How are you going to access the data from the devices? Are you going to run your study remotely, or connect the devices to your computer manually?
- If so, are you sure you can even access the files with a manual connection? In our next video, we will address exactly how to pull the data from your devices in the most efficient way.