The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Data Fitbit

Canadian lawfirm uses Fitbit wearable health tracker to prove personal injury claim

Author

By John McCarthy | Opinion Editor

November 17, 2014 | 3 min read

Data from wearable technology is being implemented in a Canadian personal injury court case in a first-of-its-kind use of the Fitbit health tracker.

Wearables may play a bigger part in similar cases in future

To prove its client was injured at work in an accident four years ago, harming her everyday mobility, law firm McLeod Law has suggested that she wore the Fitbit tracker while doing so, according to Forbes.

The women, who was injured in her line of work as a personal trainer, has gone about her daily life with the wearable tech gathering data such as steps taken and hours of sleeps in order to help collaborate her prove that her activity levels had dropped.

The data will be processed by analytics platform Vivametrica, which will compare the woman’s activity with that of the general population. The firm is assuming, as a personal trainer, the women would have had a higher-than-average fitness level.

If activity levels are found to have dropped below average, MacLeod Law will use the evidence to help prove the injury lowered her quality of life. This method is not fool-proof however, the claimant could artificially feign inactivity to fool the tracker in such a case.

Simon Muller of McLeod Law, told Forbes: "It will back up what she’s been saying, until now we’ve always had to rely on clinical interpretation, now we’re looking at longer periods of time though the course of a day, and we have hard data.”

“We’re expecting the results to show that her activity level is less and compromised as a result of her injury.”

He concluded: “[The law is] always evolving with technology, a number of years ago we saw courts requisition Facebook for information. If you’ve been wearing the Fitbit monitors it’s likely you’ll see court applications to compel disclosure of that data.”

Data Fitbit

Content created with:

fitbit

Find out more

More from Data

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +