Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) releases open source software and datasets database for wearable and connected health technologies

Shimmer Research, a global leader in wearable technology for research applications, today announced that the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) has uploaded its open source software and datasets database for wearable sensors and other connected health technologies to its website at http://www.owear.org.

“We are proud to announce the release of the OWEAR database, which includes the organization’s initial index of open source software and datasets, together with validation papers,” said Geoffrey Gill, president of Shimmer Americas and an OWEAR co-founder. “This is an evolving resource and we are actively encouraging researchers to continue to register algorithms and datasets at http://www.owear.org so we can achieve our shared goal of creating high-quality, sensor-generated health measures that can help streamline drug development and enable digital medicine.”

Shimmer’s latest OWEAR contribution is its step-count algorithm. “There are so many proprietary step-counting algorithms in use, which generate different results from the same data, that clinical researchers cannot compare data across studies employing different wearable sensors. By donating this open source algorithm, we hope to enable clinical researchers to use the same algorithm across wearables and projects and so gain access to much richer datasets,” explained Mr. Gill.

OWEAR is also launching the public phase of a DREAM Challenge which will benchmark measures of gait later this year. Generating accurate and consistent gait assessments is extremely important because they serve as a diagnostic and prognostic tool for neurological conditions, such as stroke, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, and partial paralysis; a general assessment of aging; and as a proxy for assessing cognition.

DREAM Challenges crowdsource solutions to important biomedical and bioinformatics research problems, and then evaluate the solutions objectively to identify the best one. A few sponsorship opportunities remain for this first OWEAR DREAM Challenge. Interested parties should contact Adam Litke at [email protected].

Mr. Gill will discuss these OWEAR initiatives further during his IEEE Wearables and Medical IoT Interoperability & Intelligence (WAMIII) Workshop presentation entitled “The Open Wearables Initiative: Helping Realize the Potential of Wearables to Revolutionize Clinical Trials” at 11 a.m. ET on June 11. Registration for this complimentary webinar is available at https://standards.ieee.org/events/wamiii/virtual-talk-series-2020.html.

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About the Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR)

OWEAR (https://www.owear.org) is an industry collaboration designed to promote the effective use of high-quality, sensor-generated measures of health in clinical research through the open sharing of algorithms and datasets. OWEAR serves as a community hub, indexing, distributing and benchmarking algorithms openly and transparently. It acts as a neutral broker, conducting formal, objective benchmarking processes and identifying high-performing algorithms in selected domains. Its vision is to provide the industry with a searchable database of benchmarked algorithms and source code that can be freely used by everyone to help streamline drug development and enable digital medicine. For more information, visit http://www.owear.org.

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 http://www.shimmersensing.com, https://www.linkedin.com/company/shimmer/ or follow @ShimmerSensing.