Identification of key factors related to digital health observational study adherence and retention by data-driven approaches: an exploratory secondary analysis of two prospective longitudinal studies.

Background: Longitudinal digital health studies combine passively collected information from digital devices, such as commercial wearable devices, and actively contributed data, such as surveys, from participants. Although the use of smartphones and access to the internet supports the development of these studies, challenges exist in collecting representative data due to low adherence and retention. We aimed to identify key factors related to adherence and retention in digital health studies and develop a methodology to identify factors that are associated with and might affect study participant engagement.

Tree-based classification model for Long-COVID infection prediction with age stratification using data from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative.

Objectives: We propose and validate a domain knowledge-driven classification model for diagnosing post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC), also known as Long COVID, using Electronic Health Records (EHRs) data.

Materials And Methods: We developed a robust model that incorporates features strongly indicative of PASC or associated with the severity of COVID-19 symptoms as identified in our literature review. The XGBoost tree-based architecture was chosen for its ability to handle class-imbalanced data and its potential for high interpretability.

Demographic reporting in biosignal datasets: a comprehensive analysis of the PhysioNet open access database.

The PhysioNet open access database (PND) is one of the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories of biosignal data and is widely used by researchers to develop, train, and validate algorithms. To contextualise the results of such algorithms, understanding the underlying demographic distribution of the data is crucial-specifically, the race, ethnicity, sex or gender, and age of study participants. We sought to understand the underlying reporting patterns and characteristics of the demographic data of the datasets available on PND.

Assessment of ownership of smart devices and the acceptability of digital health data sharing.

Smart portable devices- smartphones and smartwatches- are rapidly being adopted by the general population, which has brought forward an opportunity to use the large volumes of physiological, behavioral, and activity data continuously being collected by these devices in naturalistic settings to perform research, monitor health, and track disease. While these data can serve to revolutionize health monitoring in research and clinical care, minimal research has been conducted to understand what motivates people to use these devices and their interest and comfort in sharing the data. In this study, we aimed to characterize the ownership and usage of smart devices among patients from an expansive academic health system in the southeastern US and understand their willingness to share data collected by the smart devices.