The Open Wearables Initiative (OWEAR) is building an online community to aggregate data from wearables and other connected devices into a database to make it easier for investigators to find and choose publicly available data algorithms that meet their specific research needs.

Progress from the OWEAR initiative is being driven by a 22-member working group of participants from Novartis, Merck, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, PRA Health Sciences, Shimmer Research, Accelting, Sage Bionetworks and the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative, among other organizations.

A first phase of the OWEAR program will include a benchmarking project that will collect and evaluate algorithms measuring gait from wearable data.