The State of Fitness Tech and Personal Data Management
Regardless of whether you track your health and fitness progress with your phone, smartwatch or wristband, do you ever wonder about other ways these technology companies use your data? To explore this topic with Tech Square resident researchers and technologists, we invited Norh Asmare, PhD student at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to host a Power Meal about the evolution of personal tech and data management.
“My research focuses on making small biomedical devices, not necessarily health data. But personally, I am interested in health data and the ‘quantified self,’ which is attaching numbers to you as an individual and to your performance.”
WHOOP, a fitness technology company that includes a wristband, app, and a community in their performance management system for consumers, released an update to their mobile apps back in April to make it easier for users to monitor and interpret their respiratory rates. “They have a whole data team focused on monitoring and analyzing your sleep,” shared Asmare, who formerly worked at WHOOP as a Signal Processing Engineer. Though the app has been tracking user respiratory rates throughout sleep for years, they fast-tracked this release in response to the pandemic because they knew that an increased respiratory rate can be indicative of viral infection symptoms.
With COVID-19 contact tracing solutions still a slow-moving development for most public health organizations across the globe, renowned tech giants and private fitness technology companies like WHOOP have taken the initiative to develop software to help solve the problem. For example, Google and Apple's coronavirus exposure notification application programming interface (API) released in May. “It took them a very long time to even release the first version of what they thought was viable,” explained Asmare, “for the main reason being that anonymizing the person from their data [was the challenge.]” So far, only three U.S. states agreed to use it, but none have actually adopted it. The goal of this collaborative effort between these rival tech companies was to empower public health agencies to build the API into their own apps, so they can roll it out to users.
Though software companies have emphasized that information security is at the top of their agenda, privacy concerns with data anonymization have long plagued consumers. “What I think about contact tracing is not just a privacy issue. It’s also a calibration issue,” Gustav Nilsson expressed, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “What if it ends up that 25 percent of the population gets notifications that you have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive? The privacy issues are a concern as well, but I think I would turn off my phone from time to time if it was installed in the operating system.”
Data inaccuracy was another concern brought up during the lunchtime discussion. “What’s an acceptable margin of error and how accurate are these devices?” Tech Square ATL (TSQATL) Social Club member, Ben Beck, pondered. “If there is a five percent or 10 percent chance that some app is telling you that you are symptomatic based on data that is inaccurate, I imagine that could open up all sorts of legal issues.”
Pranav Gupta, Georgia Tech Graduate Research Assistant, shared this concern. “When companies are using this data, they are probably looking at the worst case scenario and notifying as many people as they can about visiting a physician.”
In regards to allowing tech companies to share personal health data, data monetization was another point of concern. “What if they are selling my information for research and using it inappropriately, can that somehow negatively impact me?” expressed TSQATL Social Club member, Jonathan Cornelius. “Will my insurance rates change because [the company] has this huge history of my heart rate being elevated, making it known that I’m predisposed for health issues?”
With all things considered, there was a general consensus that personal data sharing and monetization is just part of living in these times. “Maybe it is better to focus on how I can protect it,” Nilsson concluded. “I think all of it comes down to identifying data and perhaps how confident you are that companies are de-identifying your data before selling it. That is one of the more important things,” Gupta shared. “Do you think it would be more comfortable if there was a method of de-identification of the data at a personal level before sending it to these tech companies, or do you trust the tech companies to do it for you?”
What are your thoughts on allowing fitness tech companies to use your personal health data and de-identification? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.