Research Accelerators

Digital Health and Wearables Research Accelerator

Innovating in Wearable Technology and Mobile Applications to Improve Population Health

Our mission is to support clinical and observational research in digital health through expertise on study design, recruitment, implementation, device selection, data processing, and statistical analysis.

The Digital Health and Wearables Accelerator brings together faculty interested in leveraging wearable devices and mobile applications to measure health behaviors and outcomes, including:

Sleep
Physical activity
Heart rate
Blood pressure
Environmental exposures
Digital phenotyping
Ecological momentary assessment
Continuous glucose monitoring

While wearable technologies and mobile health applications offer tremendous potential for innovative research, they also present methodological, analytical, and implementation challenges that can be difficult for individual investigators to navigate alone. We aim to lower those barriers by pooling existing institutional knowledge and infrastructure, welcoming both experienced researchers and those new to digital health who seek to incorporate wearables into their work.

Funded Projects

PI: Julia Wrobel

Digital health technologies like wearable devices and mobile sensing platforms play a critical role in public health research because they enable continuous, real-world assessment with much less bias than self-report. At Rollins, multiple have collected rich wearable-device data, but it remains underutilized, in part due to limited resources for
processing and harmonization.

This project develops a robust, user-friendly, open-source data-processing pipeline that extracts validated metrics of sleep, physical activity, and circadian rhythms tailored specifically to the needs of Rollins researchers. The research team will build, test, and validate the pipeline while simultaneously generating a harmonized, large-scale analytic dataset. This resource will support pilot analyses, manuscripts, and competitive grant
submissions.

PIs: Tené Lewis, Dayna Johnson, Danielle Wallace, and Julia Wrobel

The transition into menopause and early menopause stage bring physical, phycological, and sleep disruptions that are not entirely driven by changing hormone levels. This project studies the relationships between stress, depression, core body temperature, and sleep across menopause stages using: