Table 6 Supporting quotations for Theme 4 ‘securing good quality data’

“I have an information sheet of how to wear and then I go through it with the patient, I go through the importance of it, why we use it, why we need it for seven days, those sorts of things.”—Participant 8, Female, Academic

“I think we have better compliance because we’ve got pretty good protocols and data quality checking methods and very robust processes to follow up trial participants or the assessors that are putting the devices on pretty quickly so that we don’t leave six months of data and then go oh by the way we better have a look at that data and see if it’s ok [laughs]. We’re onto it straight away.”—Participant 12, Female, Academic

“What we usually do in our clinical studies is we make a very easy to use booklet with figures and then also the first time is that we ourselves apply the systems and we tell in this case if it is the therapist or the patient on what they should be aware of. And we also point them in the booklet that they get so the small brochure for instance where they can find this information. And then next we let them apply everything and just see if they do it correctly and if not then we correct them. Because sometimes you don't think to mention something and you see the patient is doing that and you can intervene.”—Participant 13, Male, Academic

“The friendly trials for us are really just a confirmation that what we’re doing is you know, is good, has sound logic behind it and in practice it could work.”—Participant 6, Male, Academic

“The challenge is that there are no guidance on what measures to use. So there is a great variability in reported measures so it is not easy to compare between different studies. And that is a challenge I think.”—Participant 11, Female, Researcher

“There’s no standard”—Participant 4, Male, Academic

“And also if something is going to work it’s probably going to be about integrating different measures. So if you measure how much someone is breathing and how much they’re moving you can pick up different patterns of, you know if someone is keeping still and breathing more that’s bad, if someone is keeping still and not breathing they might have just decided that they’re going to have a Netflix binge. Eh so it’s you know, so far we haven’t got the sort of level of integration, it’s monitoring but not what we need.”—Participant 19, Male, Academic

“Yeah because we did validation study in frail populations, we had discussions also with the company on it so what we decided, when we reported outcome in hip pressure patients, for example we only reported by time and we didn't distinguish between gait and standing because we couldn't detect the gait well enough.”– Participant 9, Female, Academic

“Well yes misclassification of activities. I mean I didn’t do it because I was just designing the protocol, but I am aware from literature that misclassification of data is a big problem.”—Participant 2, Female, Academic

“We get the raw data….but again it’s a black box. Because they are all very sweet and nice guys but all their validation things if you dig a bit deeper, are very obscure. So I’ve cited this one, they’ve cited me and then we’ve cited each other and this is our validation so it’s like ahhhh cool but I don’t really trust you.”—Participant 1, Male, Academic

“I suppose if the patient could see something, if they could see what they are recording or that sort of thing I think patients would be more likely to wear it then, if it had a step counter in the front. Then I think it might encourage them to walk more than they normally do or whatever. But I think that probably would encourage the patients to wear it more.”—Participant 14, Female, Clinician

“Because patients really want to, this is my experience, they want to be able to understand their own conditions, particularly if they’ve got chronic, long term health conditions. They really welcome the feedback, you know the feedback that they get is that they see the benefits of these tools. So, and anything that they think can help the doctor, or the nurse or the physiotherapist have better information, that also helps them and might help with their medication adjustment and all the rest of it. They really are sensible actually and see the benefits.”—Participant 12, Female, Academic

“I think sometimes people can overegg burden a little. You know my experience is that most people who are getting involved in a research study, they’re doing it because they want to help. They’re not doing it out of a sense of obligation or entitlement. You’re generally working with people who are a little bit more giving, that’s the reason they’re there. And, I think people who are involved in studies would expect to have to have some level of active involvement, it’s not all passive.”—Participant 4, Male, Academic

“So I think one of the docmarks that we had a while ago was do not influence the patient or don’t show the number of steps tracked or don’t show anything just stick a wearable to them. Now, that has changed. I think that you need to give feedback to encourage the patient to continue wearing the wearable. It doesn’t mean that we have to give details or statistics on performance, even just wear time for example. So feedback and sort of monitoring of wearing is in my opinion very important. If the patient wants to know and wants to participate you know if you just stick a black box to the patient who doesn’t interact with it then I think that is not a good idea.”—Participant 17, Male, Industry