Be concerned about how apps collect, share health data, expert says.

Be concerned about how apps collect, share health data, expert says.As of 2016 there were more than 165,000 health and wellness apps available though the Apple App Store alone. According to Rice University medical media expert Kirsten Ostherr, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates only a fraction of those. Americans should be concerned about how these apps collect, save and share their personal health data, she said. "Members of the general public, including patients, have begun to play a newly important role in collecting data about health and disease," Ostherr said. "With the rise of mobile apps and the growth of smartphone and wearable-device use, people's daily lives have become experiments 'in the wild.'" The data collected through these devices offer new opportunities and challenges to researchers who want to gather information about human behavior outside the controlled settings of lab-based studies, she said. However, what the researchers can achieve with the user-generated health data relies heavily on participants' willingness to share their data, even when doing so may not serve their own best interests.