New evidence highlights why wearable adherence and data completeness matter for safe remote patient monitoring.
Remote patient monitoring is rapidly becoming part of healthcare beyond the hospital.
Wearable devices, connected medical devices and continuous monitoring technologies can provide clinicians with large amounts of physiological data without requiring the patient to remain in a hospital.
But an important question comes before interpreting that data:
Can we be confident that the available data is sufficiently complete and reliable?
A newly published scoping review in npj Digital Medicine examined wearable device adherence across 70 studies involving 9,908 participants.
The researchers found considerable inconsistency in how adherence was defined and measured. Importantly, 61% of included studies did not provide a definition or justification for what constituted adequate adherence.
Among studies that reported measurable adherence, definitions varied substantially from minimum hours of daily wear to minimum days per week or a percentage of the total monitoring period.
WHAT CHANGED?
Remote monitoring is often viewed as a relatively simple pathway:
Device Connected → Data Received → Clinical Interpretation
However, incomplete monitoring can change the meaning of what clinicians see.
A dashboard showing no abnormal measurements does not necessarily mean that the patient remained clinically stable.
The device may not have been worn.
The connection may have been interrupted.
Signal quality may have been inadequate.
Or an important period may simply not have been captured.
This creates an important clinical distinction:
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR CARE BEYOND THE HOSPITAL
As healthcare increasingly uses wearables, continuous glucose monitoring, connected medical devices and remote physiological monitoring, clinical decisions may increasingly depend on information collected outside traditional healthcare facilities.
The reliability of that information therefore becomes part of patient safety.
A clinically meaningful remote-monitoring system should consider more than the physiological measurement itself.
It should also consider:
Data Completeness
→ Recency
→ Device Adherence
→ Signal Quality
→ Clinical Context
→ Clinical Interpretation
This becomes increasingly important as algorithms and AI systems begin assisting clinicians in interpreting continuous physiological data.
CLINICAL GOVERNANCE IMPLICATIONS
Healthcare organizations implementing remote patient monitoring should clearly define:
- What constitutes adequate monitoring for each clinical use case.
- How missing or incomplete data are identified.
- When inadequate monitoring requires patient or caregiver contact.
- How device or signal failure is distinguished from clinical stability.
- Whether a clinical decision can safely be made when data completeness is insufficient.
Importantly, this review does not establish one universal adherence threshold.
Different devices, diseases and clinical purposes may require different standards.
The authors instead propose a Minimum Adherence Reporting Set to improve consistency in how wearable adherence is reported and interpreted in future research.
HOMSPITAL CLINICAL INSIGHT
The next phase of remote patient monitoring should move beyond asking:
What does the patient’s data show?
It should also ask:
How confident are we that the available data accurately represents the patient’s condition?
As monitoring becomes increasingly continuous and algorithms become more involved in interpreting physiological information, data reliability must become part of clinical intelligence.
More data does not automatically mean better evidence.
Reliable, clinically interpretable data does.
EVIDENCE CLASSIFICATION
Evidence Type:
Scoping Review 70 studies, 9,908 participants
Evidence Quality:
★★★ Moderate
Clinical Relevance:
High for remote patient monitoring and wearable monitoring
Practice Impact:
Supports stronger data-quality and adherence governance but does not establish universal clinical thresholds.
Recommended Action:
Implement data quality governance now and continue research into disease and device specific monitoring standards.
REFERENCE
Pollmann A, Lau WCW, Hine J, et al.
Wearable device adherence and engagement in health research: a scoping review.
npj Digital Medicine.
Published 15 September 2026.