Participants of the UK MS Register, can you help us with an experiment?
We would like to see if activity data from smartphones represents a realistic way of capturing data and if if it does, how could this link to your answers to the questionnaires on the MS Register website.
We are always trying to think of ways to make the gathering of data for research easier and more relevant to today’s changing technologies and lifestyles. iPhones have a built in Health app which, depending on how much you decide to make use of it, can record or help you log many aspects of your daily activity such as movement, sleep and even mindfulness and nutrition.
We would like to ask you to email us the activity data from your iPhone, straight from the Health app. We are specifically interested in your step data, though if you have been entering other information (such as diet) into the app we will receive this also.
Only people with an iPhone 5s or above can participate.
So if you have an iPhone 5s or above and a few minutes, please follow the instructions here or watch the you tube video here and share your health app stats with us.
I have an Android phone, why cant I take part?
At the moment there are a lot of competing standards on Android where the data is captured. If the iPhone experiment is successful we will look into being able to capture data from Android too.
Do I have to take part?
No! There is no requirement for you to take part in this, we are just trying to establish what would be useful in the future for the Register. We would like to stress that as usual identifiable data in never released by the Register team.
Will we see how the experiment goes?
We will feed back on social media and our blog on the website in march with basic results of how many responded and what we see. If you send us the data from the email address that you use for the MS Register, will also be able see a graph of your app data into the ‘Your Results’ section of the portal.
A step by step document on how to do it:
Here is a How to video!
