Why You Should Use Wearables During Clinical Trials?

What’s the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word “clinical trial”? You might think of being poked and prodded at a medical facility in the name of science, but clinical trials are looking much different, thanks to the use of wearables.

While exercise trackers are the most widely known wearables, the wearables that clinicians are using are more sophisticated and track more than basic biometric information.

Let’s look at some of the benefits currently witnessed in clinical trials:

1. Wearables are making it faster and easier to conduct trials

If you’ve led or participated in clinical trials, you know that they require a lot of coordination; finding a sample population, scheduling appointments for everyone, and closely overseeing procedures. While participants are paid for their time, often, the money isn't enough to make the effort and inconvenience worth it for people to participate. Wearables reduce much of the data capture burden from participants, which can help with recruitment and retention.

2. You get a more accurate picture of your patient’s health with fewer office visits

Using wearables means that you get more accurate data faster. Trials using wearables inherently require fewer in-person visits with researchers because data can be collected 24 hours a day and automatically sent to the clinician. Unlike taking a “snapshot” of data during an appointment, collecting data by using a wearable gives a much broader, more accurate picture of the patient’s health because it's collected over the long-term. Common measurements include blood pressure, glucose levels, sleep cycles, heart rate and activity level.

There are smart, connected medical devices which combine digital health with consumer-friendly wearables. Examples of these applications include insulin patch pumps, smart pills which track patient adherence, the wearable injectors; thin, flexible sensor patches which can be worn directly on the body, and smart technologies that can be integrated into clothing.

Such devices enable patients and researchers to monitor progress through the submission of data feeds without the need for frequent office visits.

3. Doctors can collect new data types to improve care

Wearable devices can collect data that are not otherwise possible to collect. For example, in trials involving sleep, wearables can help researchers test hypotheses that were not previously possible, such as how variations in sleep affect a participant’s activity or blood pressure the next day.

Small changes in movements can be hard to track, researchers must use wearables to help find the right dosage of a drug to give patients.

Security and privacy of patient data

Security and privacy are often top concerns with patients and researchers. Protecting patient data in our digital world is mission-critical and by setting up the necessary security and privacy policies and procedures, wearables can be a secure means of transmitting information. If you’re using wearables in your trials, be sure to educate participants on security best practices, such as using strong passwords and keeping both the network and wearable security software up-to-date. It’s also important that the cloud infrastructure hosting the data is built and certified to manage regulated healthcare data.

4. Wearables could help improve your patients’ quality of life

Wearables are most helpful in clinical trials that positively affect the patient's quality of life. If the trial can shed light on conditions underlying the patient's behavioural patterns and educate them on how to improve, that's an ideal scenario.

Sekaran Letchumanan

Guest Author Vice President – Operations at Flex India