A representative group of participants from Phase 3 of the Fenland Study who agreed to be re-approached for future research will be invited for the Fenland Remote Assessment Study.
The aim of the Fenland Remote Assessment Study is to enhance the information about health behaviours and exposures through remote assessment of physical activity, fitness and their environmental context in free-living over a 1-month period.
There is no clinical visit for this phase of the study – everything can be done remotely from home.
The Fenland Remote Assessment Study has several components, which participants are invited to undertake at specific points over a month as shown in the diagram below.
Information for participants
This phase of the study does not use the bespoke Fenland Study app. The smartphone apps used for this phase of the study are freely available on the Apple store for IOS and Play store for Android. It is therefore possible for friends and family to try out some of the measurements, although these would not be part of the Fenland Study per se.
Measurements
All the measurements can be done from home using a wearable smartwatch, smartphone apps and web forms. Smartwatches will be posted to your address.
Google Pixel Watch
We will give you a Google Pixel Watch 2 to wear for 1 month. You will need to connect it to your wifi – below are instructions and a video showing you how. You can keep the watch after the study.
BreathNow app
Download the BreathNow app (IOS) (Android). This app is used for the location measurements in this study and for sharing physical activity data on your phone.
Watch a video below to show you how to set up this app.
Measure location
Track your location via the free BreathNow app for one week at the end of the 1 month period. This allows us to estimate your exposure to air pollution and other factors in our environment. The app only stores location data when your phone updates its location so it does not impact on battery life.
The video below will show you how to do this.
Share phone physical activity data
Share the physical activity data (e.g. step count) on your phone with us using the BreathNow app. If you already have a smartwatch connected with your phone you can also share that data with us. You will need to choose what data fields you wish to share and you need to allow some apps to talk to each other – this can be a bit complicated so we have made guides to help.
Step test
Measure your heart rate response to a 5-minute standardised step test that you can do at home or in your local gym. The audio prompt with the stepping rate can be found here. These data can be used to estimate your fitness.
Make a note of the step height and the time you performed the test and tell us in the LAVA tool (see below).
Here’s a video showing you how to do the step test.
Measure heart rate response to exercise
Measure your heart rate response to a self-selected exercise test that you can do at home or in your local gym. If you also tell us how hard you were working, eg the speed and incline of a treadmill or the wattage of an exercise bike, we can also use these data to estimate your fitness. Make a note of these details when you are doing your test and you can enter them when you explore your data in the LAVA tool (see below).
Here’s a video showing you how.
Explore your data
Explore your own data on our secure web tool that plots your location measurements on a map alongside your movements and heart rate data.
You can also provide additional contextual information about specific time segments if you wish. We call this the LAVA tool – Location Activity Visualisation and Annotation. Watch a video below to show you how to use it.
In order to use this tool, we need to be sure it is you who are logging in to view your data. You will need the username and password that we have emailed you, plus a token that changes every time you log in.
This system is called multifactor authentication and it is similar to what you may use for online banking. The token is generated by an authenticator app such as Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator. The video below shows you how to set this up for the LAVA tool.
