The Big Picture: Are Evidation Members’ Data Scientifically Valid?

February 11, 2019

2 minutes

Evidation Highlights

You use Evidation to conveniently monitor progress toward personal health goals. By making datasets available to scientists, Evidation also is helping uncover insights to benefit people with multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, and other conditions. So, it’s important for you and researchers alike to know that Evidation's quality of life measures stand up.

Prior research conducted with activity trackers has shown that some behaviors (such as inconsistent sleep patterns) are associated with lower levels of physical and mental well-being. While this seems logical, we wanted to see if data collected via Evidation’s unobtrusive, hands-free methods have the same correlations.

Our scientists analyzed activity and sleep metrics from more than 600 Evidation Members using a global health assessment tool to assign scores for physical and mental health measures. (Controls included age, sex, race, socioeconomic status, and medical markers of anxiety and depression.) The 600 members involved in this analysis included members who had self reported having anxiety and depression and were a part of the Mental Health Study.

In this analysis of activity and sleep metrics, here’s what our researchers found:

• Two-thirds of members who participated in this study had scores above the median level for both physical and mental health. One-third scored below the median.
• Those with higher scores were more physically active, walking an average of 1,674 more steps and burning 100 more calories daily than those with scores below the median level.
• Individuals with lower scores demonstrated less consistent sleep than those with scores above the median.

The conclusion? Passive apps where most information is collected automatically can accurately characterize key quality of life metrics — good news for you and for scientists.

An ongoing, year-long study continues to examine a subset of member activity and sleep data, plus self-reported quality of life, mental health, and use of health care resources. Stay tuned as we share more on these findings, plus future research participation opportunities.