OWEAR Releases Open Source Software and Datasets Database for Wearables

Shimmer Research, a company in wearable technology for research applications, has 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.

“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 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 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. 

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 am ET on June 11.