Workshop report – How can consumer wearables transform our understanding of cardiovascular disease?

The use of data from wearable devices could transform cardiovascular research and healthcare, but faces many challenges such as data privacy, linkage to health datasets, accuracy, and health inequalities. We report the findings of a 2021 workshop held by the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre involving multiple stakeholders including patients, clinicians, researchers, policy makers and wearable developers. We propose a UK-based large scale research collection of wearable data linked to healthcare data that would place the UK and NHS in the forefront of this critical area.