Webinars
Health Research from Home runs a webinar series that offers a unique insight into creating and running research studies using smartphones and wearables.
Our subject areas cover the lifecycle of a research study and delve deep into specific issues affecting our community.
Upcoming Webinars:
Webinar 16: Using digital health data to support early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease
Who: Professor Allan Lawrie
Date: Wednesday 16 September, 1pm-2pm BST
About:
In this webinar, Professor Allan Lawrie will explore how digital health data can support earlier diagnosis of rare diseases, specifically in the field of rare cardiovascular disease.
Beginning with the use of electronic health records to identify people at higher risk, his research has expanded to include information collected from smartphones and wearable devices, providing new insights into people’s health in everyday life.
Drawing on collaborations with Stanford University through the My Heart Counts app, Allan will discuss the potential of combining continuous wearable data with healthcare records. He will share key lessons learned from model development and validation, including why promising models may fail to generalise across different populations and how differences in control groups can influence performance.
Allan will also present current work being conducted in parallel in the United States and the United Kingdom, including the development of a cross-platform digital health research infrastructure that integrates data from Android and iOS devices, as well as wearable technologies such as Oura, Fitbit, and Withings. Through the inclusion of ECG data, raw sensor data and general PPG, this research aims to develop some generalizable, translatable models not just for early detection but also remote monitoring.
Finally, this session will also explore the next phase of the platform: using large language models and behavioural science to deliver personalised, adaptive health interventions. By combining prompt engineering, reinforcement learning, and real-time behavioural feedback, the project aims to optimise “just-in-time” digital nudges that encourage healthier behaviours based on an individual’s characteristics and responses.
Watch previous webinars
View our previous webinars on our YouTube Channel.
Webinar 15: Consumer wearables to support physical activity and health during the transition to parenthood
Who: Dr Kathryn Hesketh
Date: Wednesday 8 July, 2026,
About:
Health Research from Home is delighted to welcome Dr Kathryn Hesketh as the speaker for our upcoming webinar.
Kathryn is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in Behavioural Epidemiology at University College London (UCL), where she leads a programme of research focused on supporting movement behaviours across the transition to parenthood and during early childhood. Her work explores how physical activity, play and sleep shape health and wellbeing in families with young children, bringing together insights from across disciplines to better understand their impact on both parental and child health outcomes.
In this webinar, Kathryn will present her research using consumer wearable devices to better understand patterns of physical activity during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Drawing on her work, she will discuss how wearable technologies can generate new insights into maternal and child health, and how these data might be used to inform interventions and support healthier behaviours.
The session will also explore the wider potential of wearable technologies to improve health outcomes for parents and their young children, highlighting how digital tools can be leveraged to support families during this important life stage.
Webinar 13: PROGRESS: Lessons from an end-to-end robust digital clinical trial
Who: Ed Ramos (Co-founder, Digital Trials Center, Scripps Research and COO/CSO and Co-founder, GSD Health Research) and Katie Baca-Motes (CEO & Co-Founder, GSD Health Research & Co-founder of the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center)
Date: Wednesday 18 March, 2026, 2pm – 3pm GMT
About:
Join Health Research from Home for our next webinar where we will hear from Ed Ramos and Katie Baca‑Motes as they discuss their recently published remote trial in the metabolic health space, PROGRESS.
This webinar will highlight findings from the metabolic health study PROGRESS, a large-scale, fully remote, multimodal clinical study conducted at the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center, with a focus on study design, execution, and key learnings.
Ed and Katie will walk through how diverse data streams including continuous glucose monitoring, wearable data, nutrition, biospecimens, and EHR data were integrated within a longitudinal, participant-driven study design. Particular emphasis will be placed on how behavioural strategies, including incentives, nudges, and return of data, were incorporated to support engagement over time.
Beyond the study results, they will share a practical perspective on what it takes to operationalise complex digital trials at scale, including what worked well, where challenges emerged, and what they would approach differently in future studies. The goal is to provide a candid, experience-based perspective on what it takes to successfully design and execute these types of studies.
Webinar 12: Advancing cardiovascular monitoring: from radar sensing to wearable emergency detection
Who: Jake Sunshine, Associate Professor at University of Washington / Research Scientist at Google / Past Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Sound Life Sciences (acquired by Google) and Ela Gruzewska, Senior software Engineer at Google
Date: Wednesday 14 January, 2026, 3pm – 4pm GMT
About:
In this webinar, Ela Gruzewska (Google) and Jake Sunshine (University of Washington and Google), will explore new advances in using consumer devices aimed at improved cardiovascular monitoring. Their talks will range from heart-rate sensing using radar to detecting cardiac arrest using commodity sensors and wearables.
Jake Sunshine will explore how passive sensing on commodity devices can be employed to recognise life-threatening cardiac and breathing emergencies.
He will discuss:
● Research and development of systems to detect cardiopulmonary emergencies with a focus on watch-based detection of cardiac arrest.
● The challenges involved in constructing these systems as well as lessons learned in real world deployment.
Ela Gruzewska will explain how Google’s research demonstrated transfer learning between consumer-grade radar modalities, specifically from Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) to Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar, for heart-rate monitoring. Drawing on this work, Ela will highlight how transfer learning can reduce the need for new, device-specific data collection, accelerating research and development in the field.
This session will be especially valuable for researchers, clinicians, digital-health developers.
Webinar 11: Co-produced methods for longitudinal monitoring of sleep behaviours and brain activity with children and young people
Who: Matt Jones, The Sleep Detectives project and Lorna Caddick, Ambient Teens Sleep Study.
Date: Wednesday 5 November, 2025, 1pm-2pm.
About:
Matt Jones will introduce The Sleep Detectives Project, a Wellcome Trust-funded research project exploring sleep, cognition and mental health in 6 to 18-year-old children and young people who are at genetically high risk of psychotic disorders.
The project focuses on those living with copy number variants (CNVs) that significantly increase the likelihood of conditions such as schizophrenia – reaching as high as 40 in 100 by adolescence.
He will discuss how residentials workshops and pilot protocols helped to lay the framework for the project, shaping both the methods and technologies used.
Matt will also highlight resources such as preprints and protocols available on the Open Science Framework, while reflecting on the ethical and methodological considerations of working with children, including information governance and best practice in PPIE following NIHR guidance.
Lorna Caddick, a Research Assistant at the University of Edinburgh, will then discuss the Ambient Teens Sleep Study, an MRC-funded project that used contactless radar-based sleep sensors compared against wearables.
This study used contactless sleep sensors drawing on radar sensing to record data from 48 adolescents aged 8-18 years over four weeks to assess feasibility and acceptability of these devices to be used in future work to better understand the relationship between sleep and the impact it has on health before, during and after puberty.
Lorna will outline ways radar sensors can be used as an alternative where wearables are less suitable – for example, in people with Alzheimer’s or dementia, neurodivergent participants experiencing sensory sensitivities, or those with skin conditions. She will also reflect on the importance of coproduction, especially when sensors are less known about, and, like Matt, will also share experiences of navigating privacy issues and sustaining young people’s engagement throughout the study.
Watch the webinar now (YouTube)
Webinar 10: Criminals don’t care…calling it cyber just makes it worse
Who: Daniel Dresner, Professor of Cyber Security at the University of Manchester and David Willis, Cyber security expert in the NHS.
Date: Wednesday 3 September, 2025, 1pm-2pm.
About:
Smartphones and wearables are just the tip of the iceberg in today’s growing digital health environment – an environment where health data is increasingly easy to obtain.<%