How to Start Collecting Structured Data on Your Health Product

Part 3 of this series covers what happens once your study is live: what participants experience, what data you receive, and what you can actually do with it — from claims substantiation to investor conversations to powering your next study. This is where structured beats anecdotal.

You've built your study. You've recruited your customers. Now comes the part that makes it all worth doing: collecting data that actually tells you something.

This is where Alethios does its heaviest lifting — and where the difference between a structured study and a pile of unstructured reviews becomes most visible.

What Data Collection Looks Like for Participants

Once a participant is active in your study, they receive check-ins according to the schedule you configured in Part 1. Depending on your design, this might be:

A baseline survey completed at enrollment
Weekly or bi-weekly symptom or outcome check-ins
A final assessment at the end of the observation window
Passive wearable data collected continuously in the background

Participants interact with the study through the Alethios participant experience — a clean, mobile-first interface designed to make check-ins as low-friction as possible. Higher completion rates aren't just convenient; they directly affect the quality of your dataset.

The Data You'll Receive

Alethios returns structured, time-aligned data organized by participant and study day. Depending on the endpoints you selected, this includes:

Survey responses, including validated scales if you configured them
Wearable-derived metrics (sleep, resting heart rate, HRV, steps, calories burned, and more) synced directly from participants' connected devices
Adherence data, showing how consistently participants are completing their check-ins

Everything is organized so it's ready to analyze, not just ready to export. You can track how your cohort is responding over time, identify early signals, and understand patterns across your participant population.

What This Data Is Good For

Regulatory and claims substantiation. Real-world evidence from a structured study can support health claims development, and in some contexts, contributes meaningfully to substantiation packages. It's not a Phase III trial, but it's not a review page either — and regulators and retailers increasingly want to see the difference.

Investor and partner conversations. Early-stage brands that can present structured data — even from a single-arm observational study — are in a categorically different conversation than those presenting only testimonials. It demonstrates rigor, not just enthusiasm.

Internal product development. Knowing how your customers are using your product, and what outcomes they're experiencing, is valuable for formulation decisions, usage recommendations, and identifying the subpopulations that respond best.

Your next study. A well-run observational study is also a pilot for a more rigorous one. The signal you generate here informs the design of a future controlled trial — including what endpoints to use, what population to target, and what effect size is realistic to power for.

From Structured Testimonials to Real Evidence

There's a version of this that most brands already do informally: they ask customers how they're doing, collect some responses, and publish the highlights. What Alethios adds is structure — defined criteria for who participates, consistent measurement at defined time points, and data that's organized in a way that can actually be analyzed.

The output isn't just more testimonials. It's a dataset. And a dataset, unlike a review, is something you can build on.

If you haven't yet built your study, start here:

Build a Study on Alethios →