Fitbit will be among the wearable brands that Scripps Research Institute uses in an expansive federal research study uncovering the health habits of American citizens.
The company will provide 10,000 Fitbit Charge 2 and Fitbit Alta HR health trackers as part of a one-year study that will track participants’ sleep and fitness activities.
In a statement, Fitbit Health Solutions General Manager Adam Pellegrini said the data collected will help the company explore how health indicators such as physical activity, heart rate and sleep patterns relate to critical health outcomes.
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“As part of the global shift towards precision medicine, wearable data has the potential to inform highly personalized healthcare,” he said. “Through this historic initiative, we will be able to see the role that Fitbit data can play on the path to better understanding how individualization can help to prevent and treat disease.”
More wearable brands are expected to be added to the National Institutes of Health-funded “All of Us” study, which will track a total of one million citizens over a multi-year period.
The study, announced in 2015, is expected to accelerate research and improve health by taking into account a wide variety of lifestyles, environments and biology. Researchers will use the wide sampling of data collected to work towards delivering solutions in precision medicine.
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Fitbit said it was the first wearable brand chosen for the study after the Scripps team evaluated the consumer wearables market and determined that its devices are the most popular wearables in health research worldwide.
To date, more than 470 published studies have utilized a Fitbit device, including in areas such as diabetes, cardiovascular health, oncology, mental health and post-surgery, according to Fitbit.
“Most of what researchers know is based on intermittent snapshots of health in an artificial setting or based on personal recall,” said Dr. Steven Steinhubl, a cardiologist and director of digital medicine at Scripps. “Through this research program, we’ll have access to comprehensive activity, heart rate and sleep data that may help us better understand the relationship between lifestyle behaviors and health outcomes.”
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At the end of the one-year period, Scripps researchers will provide recommendations on how Fitbit devices might be more broadly incorporated into the All of Us research program that was established by the White House in 2015.
The participation in this study helps to solidify Fitbit’s ambitious goal of moving from a simple fitness brand to a much broader digital health and medical device brand, plans it first unveiled this past summer with the launch of its first smartwatch, Fitbit Ionic.
Along those lines, the company last month announced a partnership with One Drop to integrate its devices with a diabetes management platform.