The New Digital Divide For Digital BioMarkers

Abstract

As smartphone and sensors continue to become more ubiquitous across the world, digital biomarkers have emerged as a scalable and practical tool to explore disease states and advance health. But as the digital divide of access and ownership begins to fade, a new digital divide is emerging. Who are the types of people that own smartphones or smart watches, who are the types of people that download health apps or partake in digital biomarker studies, and who are the types of people that are actually active with digital biomarkers apps and sensors - the people providing the high quality and longitudinal data that this field is being founded upon? Understanding the people behind digital biomarkers, the very people this emerging field aims to help, may actually be the real challenge as well as opportunity for digital biomarkers.

Keywords: Biomarkers; Digital; Methods; Smartphones; Technology.

Fig. 1

A conceptual schematic of digital biomarkers. The blue diamonds represent individual digital biomarkers and sample raw data used to generate them. The red box represents composite digital biomarkers and the yellow diamonds traditional basic science biomarkers.