Table 3 Supporting quotations for Theme 1 ‘the positives and negatives of using wearable devices in research’

“I’ve seen myself from my own experience in a number of trials is that the more ill the individuals are, or the more let’s say, not more degenerative the disease or the more advanced it is or whatever, they feel like if they thought that something could benefit this, even though we always explain that you are not going to directly benefit from this but this research might benefit people in similar situations, then they do feel, like willing to participate.”—Participant 6, Male, Academic

“So, the positives with wearables in general is that you can use them wherever you want. So if you are not too keen about using magnetometers then what you can do is you can literally use them anywhere and they are so small that you can, that you can, eh put them on shoes and on human bodies without them being invasive or annoying to them, to patients and also to eh to the people that are doing the experiment.”—Participant 1, Male, Academic

“Now I know, okay, another problem is that we, so we do not know a lot about certain diagnosis and how they perform in a way in the home environment. We know as clinicians a lot about how people perform in the hospital and the doctor's practice but we do not know what they do in the home environment. So we are not aware of many symptoms that may exist and do exist but we have never seen them, we have never understood them as medical professionals and the questionnaires, they do not help us with that because the questionnaires have all to be designed by medical doctors and neuropsychologists etc. who have seen the patients in the professional environment. So they cannot ask for these symptoms because only if patients have an understanding of the symptoms by themselves. In Parkinson’s Disease for example, I have the impression that we see entirely new symptoms with this new trend in getting into the home environment which we have never seen in the hospital. This is also something which is a real paradigm shift or paradigm change in the management of diseases for doctors. And you know that it means also for doctors a new understanding of how we manage our patients and we are not yet there with this paradigm shift with regard to how we have to get use of this new technology. It is not only the technology which we need to have a better understanding of something, you need the people, that they accept that there is something new around and that it doesn't solve everything.”—Participant 16, Male, Academic

“But that is for me where it is a game changer, the fact that you can really, it’s a discovery, it is what it allows you to do and you can measure things on 100 s of patients rather than on 10 patients and that is still on the clinical research side. On the real life monitoring as I said for me, is this… I believe in the power of going out of the lab and seeing the other dimension, the one that you don't see in the lab. So what does my patient do when they go home?”—Participant 5, Female, Academic

“And I think one challenge is really combining them all, so if you could help ahead of time to think through, ok how can we combine the different output files so that we can get, maximise the analysis that we can do on these files. I think that would be something that would be really helpful.”—Participant 3, Female, Academic

“People don't realise always that when we say you can take it off after one week that they are done and they throw it away so they don't remember to send it to us or bring it back to us.”—Participant 8, Female, Academic