How Wearable Devices Can Promote the Culture of Health - Incite at Columbia University

The following white paper was created through support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The proliferation of wearable technology presents an unprecedented opportunity both to measure population health in new ways and to make it more culturally salient. We envisioned what we called a “domestic health index,” or DHI, as both a promotional tool and as a valuable dataset in its own right. Over the past two years, we have consulted experts and learned more about the rapidly evolving digital health space. As part of this exploration, we conducted a scan of the use of wearable devices and mHealth (mobile health) apps in research, with a focus on work that would inform our planning for a DHI.