The Open Wearables Initiative Expands Founding Team; Begins Soliciting Algorithms and Datasets for Wearable and Connected Health Technologies

CAMBRIDGE, MA - Feb 13, 2020 - Shimmer Research, a global leader in wearable technology for research applications, today announced that the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) is now actively soliciting open source software and datasets from wearable sensors and other connected health technologies at www.owear.org. OWEAR is a collaboration designed to promote the effective use of high-quality, sensor-generated measures of health in clinical research through the open sharing and benchmarking of algorithms and datasets. OWEAR has also expanded its Working Group to include executives from four major global pharmaceutical companies, a major clinical research organization (CRO), Sage Bionetworks and the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe).

Wearables, ingestible sensors and in-home monitoring technologies offer the opportunity to assess an individual’s health continuously, objectively and in real time. As a result, they hold the potential to revolutionize health, healthcare, and health research. However, the lack of accepted endpoints is proving to be a major impediment to the adoption of these digital measures in clinical trials. OWEAR will leverage the work of thousands of researchers from academia, pharma, and other organizations during the past decade to facilitate the development of those requisite endpoints.  

OWEAR will serve as a community hub, indexing, distributing and benchmarking algorithms openly and transparently. It will act as a neutral broker, conducting formal, objective benchmarking processes and identifying high-performing algorithms in selected domains. Its goal is to provide the industry with a searchable database of benchmarked algorithms and source code that can be freely used by everyone. This new resource will help to streamline drug development and enable digital medicine.

In a conscious effort not to duplicate resources, OWEAR will not host the software or datasets because that role is already fulfilled by repositories such as GitHub, Synapse.org, and UCI Machine Learning Repository. OWEAR is focused instead on aggregating all the available resources and collecting the required metadata into an index so that healthcare researchers can more easily find and evaluate the algorithms and software that best meet their needs.

“Shimmer Research is proud to help lead OWEAR and partner with our peers to develop this new open source database for the benefit of the entire community. Shimmer has already registered several algorithms with OWEAR and we are reaching out to the over 3,000 leading researchers who use our wearable sensors for healthcare applications and encouraging them to register their algorithms and datasets with OWEAR as well,” said Geoffrey Gill, president of Shimmer Americas.

“We are delighted to join this important digital medicine initiative,” said Jennifer Goldsack, executive director at DiMe. “DiMe firmly believes that collaboration is critical to achieve our shared goal of advancing digital medicine to optimize human health.”

“We are excited to partner with OWEAR and look forward to bring together OWEARs open initiative with Sage Bionetworks efforts for open and collaborative benchmarking. Open wearables first benchmarking project is focusing on the use of wearable sensors to measure gait,” said Dr. Larsson Omberg, vice president, systems biology at Sage Bionetworks.

OWEAR is asking software developers and medical researchers to register algorithms related to digital medicine and publicly-available datasets from wearables and connected health technologies, even those with license restrictions, at www.owear.org. This information will be collected into an index of all current resources which will be made available soon.

By registering their algorithms and datasets with OWEAR, developers will gain recognition for their commitment to advancing the field. Contributors will also gain greater visibility for their work among clinical researchers in academia and industry, leading to potential collaboration and consulting opportunities. They will also receive feedback and potentially help from end-users and other developers to augment their work.

Shimmer staff will be available to discuss OWEAR in person at booth #727 at SCOPE, the summit for clinical ops executives, which will be held from Feb. 18-21 at the Hyatt Regency Orlando in Orlando, FL. Further information about that conference is available at https://www.scopesummit.com.

OWEAR was co-founded in Sept. 2019 by Shimmer, Dr. Vincent van Hees, author of the GGIR software and algorithms for movement sensor calibration, sensor wear detection, and signal aggregation, and Nextbridge Health, which is developing the Nextbridge Exchange, an online marketplace and discovery platform for the clinical research community. 

About Sage Bionetworks

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research and technology development organization that was founded in Seattle in 2009. Our focus is to develop and apply open practices to data-driven research for the advancement of human health. Our interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers work together to provide researchers access to technology tools and scientific approaches to share data, benchmark methods, and explore collective insights, all backed by Sage’s gold-standard governance protocols and commitment to user-centered design. Sage is a 501c3 and is supported through a portfolio of competitive research grants, commercial partnerships, and philanthropic contributions. For more information, please visit https://sagebionetworks.org.

About the Digital Medicine Society

Founded in 2019, the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) is the first professional organization for experts from all disciplines comprising the diverse field of digital medicine. Together, we drive scientific progress and broad acceptance of digital medicine to enhance public health.

DiMe is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to advancing digital medicine to optimize human health. We do this by serving professionals at the intersection of the global healthcare and technology communities, supporting them in developing digital medicine through interdisciplinary collaboration, research, teaching, and the promotion of best practices.

For more information about DiMe, please visit dimesociety.org and follow @_DiMe_Society.

About Shimmer Research

Founded based on Intel technology in 2006, Shimmer Research is a well-established wearable technologies services and sensor manufacturing company based in Dublin, Ireland. In addition to standard products, Shimmer provides customized sensor development services, volume manufacturing, and complete wearable sensor solutions of any complexity. Shimmer’s technology and services have been employed by thousands of researchers at more than 900 leading companies, universities, and research institutes in more than 75 countries. Shimmer’s technology is incorporated in the products and services of more than 20 original equipment manufacturers. Shimmer has an ISO 13485:2016 certified medical devices quality management system. For more information, visit www.shimmersensing.com,  https://www.linkedin.com/company/shimmer/ or follow @ShimmerSensing.