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Big Pharma Hands Out Fitbits To Collect Better Personal Data

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 14th, 2015, 10:00am UTC

An anonymous reader writes: Since the dawn of modern medicine, there have really only been two ways to know what a medical patient is doing: A) keep them around and monitor them, or B) ask them. The first is often impractical, and the second is fraught with misreporting. However, we're now in the age of data collection, and medical data is no exception. Pharmaceutical companies are gleefully passing out Fitbits and other wearables so they can more accurately test the drugs they make. Early trials have already found such devices to be better than human memory at reporting things like how much a patient walks. Other organizations are using movement data to algorithmically decide whether a patient needs a higher level of treatment. The article optimistically adds, "Down the line, wearables also could help pharmaceutical makers prove to insurance companies that their treatments are effective, thus reducing health costs."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Big+Pharma+Hands+Out+Fitbits+To+Collect+Better+Personal+Data%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1iIZTqo"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F09%2F14%2F1219204%2Fbig-pharma-hands-out-fitbits-to-collect-better-personal-data%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/14/1219204/big-pharma-hands-out-fitbits-to-collect-better-personal-data?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/14/1219204/big-pharma-hands-out-fitbits-to-collect-better-personal-data?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/zyyesfF-YOw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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