Table 7 Supporting quotations for Theme 5 ‘a paradigm shift’

“Eh, from the clinical operations perspective at the moment. So let’s say the aim is to make our trials better in terms of faster, more precise, getting better readouts and cheaper. At the moment the reality is a bit different. At the moment they make it slower and have additional patient and in-site burden and makes them more expensive. So we are still sort of working towards the benefits of it. I don’t know, or I wouldn’t say that its necessarily a downside but if this situation continues too long then patients or maybe stakeholder will sort of lose interest sand it will have a bad effect on the field itself. So I think it needs, sort of from the pharma perspective we do need to show very clear impact either on cost, operations or quality of endpoints.”—Participant 17, Male, Industry

“I think that there has been a massive, I mean for me it has been interesting to observe in the sense that coming from the technical background, seeing the uptake before these products were actually ready to be out there, for me was the most interesting part of the story. And somehow it is something that reminded me of what happened with motion capture back in the days. Everyone started having these labs where they think that it was just something that you started using and you had all the data that you collected.”—Participant 5, Female, Academic

“In my mind the early stages, more of the focus was on the hardware, and then the ehm, after some of the hardware questions kind of started to settle down a bit then it became more about studies that were aimed at validating the capacity of the IMUs or activity sensors to, in particular if we take the IMUs, it’s kind of moved through different ages. It’s gone from that age of ok, can we eh, lets develop on the hardware level first, then let’s see how well we can measure existing gait measures so like spatiotemporal measures of gait etc. in a controlled laboratory environment, to then gradually looking at ok, lets now that we’ve figured out how we can validate it against gold standard for measuring spatiotemporal parameters, now can we see if we can identify any differences associated with this clinical group or that clinical group so we are comparing the groups to the norm, then there’s that evolution into I suppose seeing whether or not we can move the focus of the measurement outside of the laboratory. So, you know, instead of it being another way to capture information within the clinical environment, now can we actually go out to the persons home, and can we have a HCP go to their home and capture that, or can we capture it in a primary care setting or in a physio setting.”—Participant 4, Male, Academic

“ I think I’d like to see more, almost more guidance or help, almost from the accelerometer developers in terms of data output and how the researcher can use it right.”—Participant 3, Female, Academic

“Keep doing it. As I said we are still in the discovery phase with all this and we can only when we have understood enough will we be able to use it and understand what we can do with it. So for me at the moment it is working well in the sense that as I said we are finding out things that we would not have known before but how to implement those is the next step. For me there is still a lot of opportunities out there.”—Participant 5, Female, Academic

“Well we are not the end users or consumers of this, that’s the patient but we are very close to the patient and then there are the other researchers and we can already see that that is a problem and that there is a disconnect. I mean I can already see with some of the conversations with my academic partners, but then with the algorithm they are so vast. I think it is the right thing we are doing. It’s not ideal as I said because we can’t predict the future and if we could that would be great.”—Participant 17, Male, Industry

“We’re movement scientists, and I think we should never lose sight of the fact that whilst again we can use laboratory based motion capture systems, and we can use inertial sensors to capture movement, they can create a whole new paradigm of how we measure movement and behaviour but ultimately we should never try and remove the human from the loop.”—Participant 4, Male, Academic

“I would say that….they are not a pancea. They are….[laughs], there is this trend that everything needs to be measured and that because we may have so much data, that this is useful and this is better. And for some research questions, a questionnaire or a simple question may be better and there are many important things related to health that an activity monitor wouldn’t measure such as the type of activity for instance. And, I think that it is important to remember that. That sometimes we tend to go for the more complex technology and sometimes you would just need to talk more with the patient and give less devices.”—Participant 10, Female, Academic