What makes wearable devices usable? Lessons learned from a 47-day Antarctic ski expedition to the South Pole (INSPIRE22)

Wearable devices are used increasingly within the medical world, ranging from monitoring for head trauma to screening for heat injuries. Understanding what makes these devices tolerable to the end user in remote hostile environments is crucial for research, military, and humanitarian medicine, with broader translational implications. This opportunistic qualitative study trialled five different forms of wearable devices on the Interdisciplinary South Pole Innovation and Research Expedition 2022 (INSPIRE 22), an expedition which skied from the edge of the Antarctic land mass to the South Pole. It also examined the feasibility of near-real time analysis of wearable data from a hostile environment remotely from the UK. Key findings highlighted that usability of wearable devices was impacted by human-device interface factors (comfort, user buy in, and charging) and device resource requirements (power, data, and storage space on a personal mobile phone). Users required a more positive than negative aspects to maintain device interaction. Near-real-time data analysis of wearable technology from extreme environments is feasible but only on a small inconsistent scale due to limited connectivity. Reliable internet access, broader bandwidth, and better user access to data are essential to achieve meaningful health and performance insights for the individual and wider organisations.