Physical activity in the era of mHealth big data: considerations on accuracy and bias

Adamakis, Manolis

Physical activity in the era of mHealth big data: considerations on accuracy and bias

Files

11222_Adamakis Sspjssm-volume2-2019-6-10.pdf(316.11 KB)

Published version

Date

2019-02

Authors

Adamakis, Manolis

Publisher

Swedish Scientific Publications

Abstract

Recently smartphones have been considered a powerful tool with which to study large-scale population health on a global scale. Landmark Nature publications highlight the global uptake of mobile technology and the staggering potential for big data to promote large observational studies with big datasets from electronic health records. However, these data have to be generated through unbiased, accurate and validated measurement techniques. This paper discusses in detail some of the inconsistencies in smartphone health apps’ data collection and the issues arising from the increasing availability of low-quality health data. These threats to valid inference from observational studies using big data remain a great challenge to overcome and future research should focus on the development and validation of more accurate algorithms for health-related smartphone apps.

Keywords

Smartphones , Physical activity , Low quality health data , Health data , PA monitoring , Health research , mHealth , Big data

Citation

Adamakis, M. (2019) ‘Physical activity in the era of mHealth big data: Considerations on accuracy and bias’, SSP Journal of Sport Sciences and Medicine, 2, pp. 6-10.