PatientsLikeMe Study infographic

Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects a patient’s ability to walk. Unfortunately, the only assessment of their impairment usually happens during an office visit with their physician. More detailed information about day to day experiences could provide healthcare professionals useful data.

To address this situation, PatientsLikeMe partnered with Biogen to conduct a study using wearable Health Tech consumer devices. 248 PatientsLikeMe members with MS were issued FitBit One activity trackers. Of this group, 2o3 members activated their trackers and synced them to share their data with the study. PatientsLikeMe has now released the results of the 21-day study. In this time, the participants provide an average of 18.21 days of data, totaling 15 million steps and covering 6,820 miles. More than two thirds reported that the tracker would be helpful to them in managing their MS.

The group will present the data at the American Academy of Neurology’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC this week (April 18 through 25). This is just one example of how wearable Health Tech devices can make it possible to collect large amounts of useful data from a large sample of subjects at relatively low cost.