Open mHealth Popular Standard (Part 3)

Andy OramThe first section of this article introduced the common schemas for mobile health designed by Open mHealth, and the second section covered the first two design principles driving their schemas. We’ll finish off the design principles in this section. Here, the ideal is to get accurate measurements to the precision needed by users and researchers. But many devices are known to give fuzzy results, or results that are internally consistent but out of line with absolute measurements.

The goal adopted by Open mHealth is to firm up the things that are simple to get right and also critical to accuracy, such as units of measurement discussed earlier. They also require care in reporting the time interval that a measurement covers: day, week, month. There’s no excuse if you add up the walks recorded for the day and the sum doesn’t match the total steps that the device reports for that day.

Some participants suggested putting in checks, such as whether the BMI is wildly out of range. The problem (in terms of public health as well as technology) is that there are often outlier cases in health care, and the range of what’s a “normal” BMI can change. The concept of a maximum BMI is therefore too strict and ultimately unhelpful...