Raproto: An Open-Source Platform for Rapid Prototyping with Wearable Devices

Advances in wearable technology have enabled ubiquitous use of wearable devices in remote patient monitoring, particularly in clinical trials. Because of the reliance on highquality data in these endeavors, the first and often the most time-consuming step is to build a data collection system. While many systems have been developed to address this, they are often highly specific and customized to the task at hand, and are often not generalized enough to support other tasks. To remedy this, we developed Raproto, an open-source easy-to-use rapid prototyping platform that does not require the time, effort, and expertise needed for custom development. The Raproto platform consists of three components, the wearable device(s), communication protocol, and remote storage. These components support the collection, transmission, storage, analysis, and visualization of large-scale data with applications from smaller-scale research studies to large clinical trials. To reduce the burden of device and application development, we created multipurpose and customizable smartwatch applications on both the Android and Tizen operating systems. We evaluate our platform in a lab setting as well as in two real-world case studies. Overall, we find that we can collect data using our application for over 24 hours on a single charge and there is little to no data loss, thus making it an ideal tool to preface customized device development for real-world impact and commercialization.