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The proliferation of advanced wearable medical technologies is increasing the production of Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD). However, there is lack of evidence on whether the quality of the data generated from wearables can be effectively used for patient care. In order for PGHD to be utilized for decision making by health providers, it needs to be of high quality, that is, it must comply with standards defined by health care organizations and be accurate, consistent, complete and unbiased. Although medical wearables record highly accurate data, there are other technology issues as well as human factors that affect PGHD quality when it is collected and shared under patients’ control to ultimately used by health care providers.

This paper explores human factors and technology factors that impact on the quality of PGHD from medical wearables for effective use in clinical care.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 PGHD stakeholders in Australia, the US, and the UK. Participants include ten health care providers working with PGHD from medical wearables in diabetes, sleep disorders, and heart arrhythmia, five health IT managers, and two executives. The participants were interviewed about seven data quality dimensions including accuracy, accessibility, coherence, institutional environment, interpretability, relevancy, and timeliness. Open coding of the interview data identified several technology and human issues related to the data quality dimensions regarding the clinical use of PGHD.

The overarching technology issues …