Clinical assessments provide valuable snapshots. Continuous measurement helps reveal what happens between them

A clinic visit captures a moment. A questionnaire captures someone’s account of their experience. But how do sleep, activity and daily routines unfold between appointments?

Looking below the waterline

On the surface are episodic assessments: scheduled visits, clinical tests and questionnaires. These provide essential information but, may leave gaps in our understanding of everyday behaviour.

Below the surface, wearable sensors can collect data over successive days and nights. With appropriate analysis, researchers can examine when behaviours occur, how long they last and how they vary.

Understanding how behaviour unfolds

When evaluating an intervention, total activity or average sleep duration may tell only part of the story. Researchers may also want to understand how behaviour is accumulated; through brief periods of movement, sustained walking, consolidated sleep or repeated interruptions.

Our scientific approach encourages analysing raw accelerometer data as meaningful bouts or events. Detecting transitions between behaviours helps identify these events, allowing researchers to investigate their timing, duration and distribution.

Raw quality from sensor to measure

Meaningful digital measures depend on transparency and traceability throughout the journey from sensor-level data to reported results.

Collecting continuous raw data points detects behavioural transitions for event and bout-based processing. These steps help distinguish behaviour from gaps in device wear and support consistent analysis.

Together with appropriate measure validation, these foundations underpin our work towards digital measures that meet the standards required for clinical use.

Objective data, meaningful context

Wearables reduce reliance on participants remembering and reporting their behaviour. They complement clinical assessments, diaries and questionnaires, which remain important for understanding symptoms and personal experience.

For trials, studies and clinical assessments evaluating interventions, the opportunity is to connect clinical outcomes with a fuller picture of daily behaviour.

Planning a study? Talk to ActivInsights about measuring sleep and activity alongside your intervention.

Graphic acknowledgement: Adapted from the “Visible vs. Invisible Data” concept credited in DiMe materials to Evidation Health, reworked by Elektra Labs and the Playbook team.