Good afternoon FitBit Developers and Community,
A colleague and I intend to conduct some research with a sample of FitBit-owning workers to draw a link between their sleep and a variety of outcomes they will share with us via online surveys at work. These employees and Fitbit users are giving us permission to use their Fitbit data as part of the data set for our larger workplace study.
We plan to access the data via the API, using the usernames the research participants provide. Before doing so, we will have the consent of the research participants, but we wanted to ask whether there is a particular language we should use in gaining the participants’ permission. Since it is somewhat unclear in the terms of service regarding data scraping: “Don’t scrape data;” I figured I would post this here as well. We are not scraping data from users without their permission and instead would like to retrieve data for the users who are participating in our workplace survey study saving them the effort of sending us their data.
Before we collect the data, however, we would like to ask whether you have suggested language to which the participants should agree. They simply need to consent to their data being matched with their survey responses, but Fitbit may have specific recommended language.
The data collection will follow the requirements of the university’s institutional review board, which is designed to protect human research participants. To be clear, we only intend to use data from the few hundred participants who request to participate in our study. The data will only be used to generate generalizable findings that will be reported in an academic article. We will not use the data for any commercial use.
Could someone suggest whether specific language is required by FitBit to conduct such a study, or can we simply generate our own consent form?
Thanks for the advice.
