Abstract
The tracking and documenting of one’s personal health status and physical activity is one way to both monitor and motivate oneself to become engaged in a healthy lifestyle. Today’s wearable tracking technologies (“wearables”) have digitized the process of monitoring and recording health-related data. From a research perspective, health activity data are becoming increasingly relevant to health research, especially regarding individualized treatment recommendations. One constraint to using personal health data for research is the willingness of the participant to share their personal, mobile-tracked health data for research. This study explored the everyday life use of wearable devices to track self-recorded health data and the willingness of participants to share this data with researchers. Participants aged ≥50 years (n = 1013) were interviewed in a representative Swiss telephone survey. Results indicated that 43.3% of all participants used one or more mobile devices (activity tracker, smartwatch, smartphone, or tablet) and that 27.6% used these devices to record health data. Additionally, 57.2% of participants who tracked their health data were willing to share their information with researchers. Income significantly contributed to predicting this willingness, whereas other independent variables were not significant predictors. This study indicated a relatively positive overall willingness to share self-recorded mobile health data with the science community.