King's College London

A few hours in a hospital room can only tell a clinician so much. A patient's sleep, their mood, their activity, their heart rate: all of it fluctuates long before and after they walk into a consultation. For Dr Zulqarnain Rashid, Senior Research Fellow and Technical Lead at King's College London, the disparity between what a clinical visit can reveal and what personal data collected from wearable fitness technology can uncover is a gap well worth investigating.

‘We can make better-informed decisions about people’s care by combining continuous, real-world data from wearable devices with clinical data collected in hospital,' he says. ‘Rather than relying on a snapshot from a few hours of clinical assessment, wearables allow us to capture how a person’s health, behaviour and physiology change in their everyday environment. This can help the healthcare system deliver more personalised and data-driven care.'

The implications are substantial: wearable devices and remote monitoring do not just add convenience to healthcare; they lessen the burden on already stretched health systems while giving clinicians a far richer picture of the people they treat. Wearable technology is paving the way for the future of healthcare.

What King's has built

At King’s, Dr Rashid has been working for the past decade on an infrastructure to glean vital data from wearable tech called RADAR-base.

RADAR-base is an open-source, end-to-end platform for collecting and analysing health data from everyday devices, including Fitbit, Garmin and Apple Watch. It runs on two applications built for different kinds of data. The Active App gathers information participants provide directly through questionnaires and tasks. The Passive App collects data quietly in the background, drawing on phone and device sensors without requiring the participant to do anything at all.

The platform's origins go back to 2016, when funding from the EU's Innovative Medicines Initiative set out to answer a specific question: Could wearable devices meaningfully track conditions like depression, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy? By 2017-18, the team was collecting data from real patients. Since then, RADAR-base has been used in more than 40 research use cases and has gathered data from over 100,000 participants across the UK and Europe.

Much of that scale is thanks to the work of Professor Richard Dobson and his group, who have spent years turning raw device data into something clinically useful. Their focus has been on developing digital biomarkers, feeding insight back to participants and opening up the research side of digital health to the wider academic community and clinicians rather than keeping it locked inside individual studies. This data can be instrumental in research. To date, the team at King’s has run studies on disorders such as epilepsy, eating disorders and major depression. Among others, they are currently running a study on almost 120 pregnant women in order to learn more about preeclampsia.

Where the field is heading

Health systems are working to bring wearable data into everyday clinical infrastructure, including the NHS App. Doing this will hopefully help shift care from hospital to home and from treatment to prevention. But that move depends entirely on people knowing how to pull usable data out of these devices and turn it into something a clinician or researcher can act on. As Dr Rashid puts it, this is not a distant possibility. It is already the direction the field is moving in, and the professionals who understand it now will be the ones equipped to work within it.

This is where learning the skills to use this data counts. King's Professional Education has built a direct response to this skills gap in the form of a Digital Health and Wearable Technology short course, running from16-18 September 2026.

This course is open to everyone, but is of particular interest to two main audiences. The first is medical doctors who want to develop the technical skills to use a platform like RADAR-base themselves. The second is researchers who need to know how to collect data from wearable devices properly in the first place. Both groups tend to be missing the same thing: not an appreciation of why this data matters, but the practical, technical grounding to work with it.

To help with that knowledge gap, the Digital Health and Wearable Technology short course will teach participants how to design a research study of their own, choose the right device and turn data into digital biomarkers. Participants will also learn about the ethics of enrolment and data security, Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) and the AI skills necessary for analysing the data gathered by wearable devices.

The short course is only the beginning, Dr Rashid says. A full master's module on wearable tech is launching at King's next year for MSc students. For clinicians and researchers who want to be ready for that shift rather than catching up with it, the Digital Health and Wearable Technology short course is a place to start.