Table 5 Supporting quotations for Theme 3 ‘the importance of compromise in protocols’

“So the arm ones weren’t as accurate as the trunk ones ehm, so it comes back because you know there are things that you can wear on your wrist, eh which is more natural as people are used to wearing watches. So eh, you know in some situations for much more prolonged wearing that might be preferable but you know you’re going to have to be careful because you’re going to be losing some sort of precision particularly around walking”—Participant 19, Male, Academic

“What can we do to minimise the burden to the participant? But it has to be counter balanced with, we want data of this quality so we’re clear of what we need from the device so it’s that balancing act. And in using the devices that we have, we know that they’re not perfect but we have chosen to eh, we can accept the compromise and still get data that. Gives us good information.”—Participant 12, Female, Academic

“Even if it’s some small vendor who is not part of the preferred vendor list of the company and we try to find the best fit. If that’s not possible, too expensive, you know too many GDPR issues, we sort of downgrade and say ok what’s the bare minimum we need and sort of to be, it’s almost a bit cynical but in the end its very often ‘ok, we’ll just stick an Actigraph to the non-dominant wrist’. We find ok at the beginning you said you wanted specific gait parameters, you can’t do that if you stick an Actigraph to the non-dominant wrist, eh so either we do it properly or we don’t do it at all and I think that’s also important that if we deviate too much from what we want we have to say no otherwise we’ll do too much harm to ourselves.”—Participant 17, Male, Industry

“If we are just talking about research and we need to push through a high number of patients while all the patients are in the clinic, then I would go for an easy system that is easy to use for the people that do the data collection so in our case medical students for example and then that would be a different system so I cannot really say which system is best because it really depends on what you want. This is why in XX for example we often end up with multiple systems that we are using for multiple things so if we are going for home assessment we are using a different brand than we are using for an in-clinic assessment.”—Participant 1, Male, Academic