Why fitness trackers can't be validated - they may need different clinical trials

Fitness trackers like Fitbit, Fuelband, and Jawbone are all the rage and if they help individual people exercise more, great, but right now they are in the placebo world regarding evidence they work any better than anything else overall.

A new article notes that the problem in verifying if these are effective may be that traditional randomized trial designs used in health and medicine are not well suited to mobile health, and perhaps the “micro-randomized trial” method can be a useful alternative. Micro-randomized trials are trials in which participants are randomly assigned a treatment from the set of possible treatment actions at several times throughout the day. Therefore, each participant may be randomized hundreds or thousands of times over the course of a study.

“These trials will provide evidence regarding in which real-time settings wearable devices should provide treatments to help you and me, and in which settings these treatments will only aggravate us,” said Dr. Susan Murphy, senior author of the article.

Citation: Dempsey, W., Liao, P., Klasnja, P., Nahum-Shani, I. and Murphy, S. A. (2015), Randomised trials for the Fitbit generation. Significance, 12: 20–23. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00863.x URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2015.00863.x/abst...