FAIR Cardiovascular Disease Rehabilitation Data

The BENEFIT project is an interdisciplinary eHealth initiative to offer long-term lifestyle support for patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Data collected from BENEFIT patients is heterogeneous and encompasses demographics, observational lifestyle data, self-reported motivation for lifestyle change and physical measurements. Analysing these results can provide new insights into the effects of different intervention strategies used in the cardiac rehabilitation programme on maintaining a healthier lifestyle. More importantly, collecting and aggregating similar results from related studies, world-wide, could facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of lifestyle maintenance and its variations across diverse subgroups. The heterogenous nature of the data, the multiple collection methods and data formats, and different privacy restrictions, are all barriers to such integration. Here, we propose the adoption of the FAIR principles (i.e. that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) to enable easier reuse and interoperation between cardiac rehabilitation data of CVD patients.