“Beyond the technological capabilities, there is now the critical issue of efficacy — of the devices, the apps that link to them and the petabytes of data generated — which is leading wearables makers to coordinate with independent researchers to see if they deliver as advertised.
Joshua Hagen, a research associate professor at The Ohio State University’s Department of Integrated Systems Engineering, was studying biosensors more than a decade ago at the Air Force Research Labs “before wearables really exploded on the scene,” he said. Hagen then started testing devices on elite athletes, monitoring their performance data. “There’s a ton of devices out there, but we have to first and foremost trust the data that’s coming off of them,” he said.”