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What do you want from people with Fitbits? If you just want them to use your app and send you data I think all you need to do is ask.

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If you have a Fitbit that includes heart rate monitoring, please consider joining the study.

Unfortunately, as a non-profit academic institution, we don't have any budget for advertising. I wish we could run millions of dollars of ads online and on TV to encourage people to join. Instead, I guess we'll have to rely on word of mouth.

I tried to install the app but unfortunately it is not available in my region. I understand that this is hard due to privacy and legal issues.

Also, we need approval from our institutional review board. That might complicate making the study available in multiple countries.

Why not cut through the red tape and collaborate with research groups in other countries? These groups can release apps for their respective regions, and as long as the data generated by the apps is compatible, it can be aggregated any way you want.

That's a great suggestion. To do that, though, I'm pretty sure that we'd still need approval from our IRB. When you do research within an academic institution, everything needs to be looked over by a relatively impartial third party. And in general, I think that's a good thing -- especially when the research involves human or animal subjects.

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