What You Should Know:
- Evidation, the company creating new ways to measure and improve health in everyday life, today announced a partnership with USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research to incorporate wearable device data into the landmark Understanding America Study.
- The goal of the partnership is to power research that will generate insights into healthy aging. Evidation and USC will collaborate to integrate a robust wearables dataset into extensive survey data that has been collected as part of the Understanding America Study for almost two decades. Evidation and USC have been working together since 2017 and this work expands upon the NIH-funded American Life in Realtime (ALiR) study, an initiative that achieved a nationally representative digital health benchmark dataset.
Making Healthcare More Accessible by Data-Driven Improvements in Wearable Devices
Launched in 2014 and supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Understanding America Study is a nationally representative panel of over 12,000 people across the United States. Administered by USC, UAS offers rich data from a demographically diverse set of participants on topics varying from health and wellness, work, leisure, retirement, social issues, and aging.
Evidation will facilitate the collection of prospective wearable data from thousands of individuals to better understand and analyze activity and sleep data from everyday life. Layered on top of extensive survey data, this longitudinal wearable data will help unearth answers to key questions regarding how to extend life span, as well as healthspan – the duration someone can be healthy without chronic and debilitating disease or disability.
“Evidation’s decade plus experience consenting, curating, and making sense of wearable data makes them the ideal partner for this important expansion of the Understanding America Study. We’re excited to build on the foundation of data already available as part of UAS to uncover insights that will make it possible to extend and improve healthspan,” said Arie Kapteyn, Professor of Economics and the founding Executive Director of the Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California. “We know that Evidation shares our commitment to use the most advanced technology in service of improving people’s health and welfare, and will bring tremendous value to this collaboration.”
