Summarized data to achieve population-wide anonymized wellness measures

The growth in smartphone market share has seen the increasing emergence of individuals collecting quantitative wellness data. Beyond the potential health benefits for the individual in regards to managing their own health, the data is highly related to preventative and risk factors for a number of lifestyle related diseases. This data has often been a component of public health data collection and epidemiological studies due to its large impact on the health system with chronic and lifestyle diseases increasingly being a major burden for the health service. However, collection of this kind of information from large segments of the community in a usable fashion has not been specifically explored in previous work. In this paper we discuss some of the technologies that increase the ease and capability of gathering quantitative wellness data via smartphones, how specific and detailed this data needs to be for public health use and the challenges of such anonymized data collection for public health. Additionally, we propose a conceptual architecture that includes the necessary components to support this approach to data collection.