Wearable Devices in Public Health Research

Friday, October 4th at 4pm in Rocky 310

In the last ten years, technological advances have made many activity- and physiology-monitoring wearable devices available for use in both clinical trials and large-scale epidemiological studies. This trend will continue and even expand as devices become cheaper and more reliable. These developments open up a tremendous opportunity for clinical and public health researchers to collect critical data at an unprecedented level of detail, while posing new challenges for statistical analysis of rich, complex data. This talk will present a collection of examples and analysis approaches that use accelerometer data, including activity classification; identifying and interpreting variability in activity trajectories; building regression models in which activity trajectories are the response; and understanding shifts in the circadian rhythms that underlie the timing of activity. We’ll draw on several applications, including the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging and data collected through the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health.