Hypothesis generating model-based wearable clinical trial

CBMSE, US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, USA
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2079v1
Subject Areas
Clinical Trials, Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Ethical Issues
Keywords
infectious disease, public health, physiology, diagnostic, wearable, environmental health
Copyright
© 2016 Kirkup
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Kirkup BC. 2016. Hypothesis generating model-based wearable clinical trial. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2079v1

Abstract

Wearable physiological sensors have the projected capability to detect unknown and unreported health conditions. Development requires rounds of discovery-oriented human subject research and confirmatory clinical trials. However, each study is a significant investment and difficult to justify in isolation. This impasse requires bootstrapping spiral device development through hypothesis-generating, model-based clinical trials. An unconventional clinical trial design addresses environmental health and infectious disease, through the day-to-day observation of diverse people who occupy a shared environment. The design utilizes a flexible suite of developmental diagnostic devices to detect the physiological impact of exposures. Through advanced data analysis, the devices provide information about deviations from normal parameters for each human subject. The correlation of these anomalies across the entire cohort generates hypotheses about exposures that impact health. These hypotheses can be investigated further in targeted studies and lead to simultaneous refinement of the devices.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.