From Activity Tracking to Activation Health: Building a Digital-Health Research Platform

The ACTIVATION research program began with a practical problem: much of what matters in recovery happens outside the clinic and outside the laboratory. Patients move through daily life, adapt to surgery, manage symptoms, and recover function in ways that are difficult to capture with occasional appointments or isolated performance tests.

In 2024, Dr. John Holash and Dr. Joe Kenal co-developed and co-led ACTIVATION: Activity Capture To Investigate Voluntary Activity in Oncology and Normal Populations. The program was designed to investigate how mobile-health and wearable technologies could support objective monitoring of physical activity, recovery trajectories, and health outcomes across clinical and healthy populations.

From Seed Funding to Infrastructure

Initial support came through a $20,000 McCaig Institute SPARK Grant, which established the foundation for a multidisciplinary collaboration spanning kinesiology, orthopaedic surgery, oncology, rehabilitation medicine, and digital health research.

As the project developed, it became clear that the research needed more than a simple activity-tracking tool. It needed infrastructure: participant enrollment, informed consent, secure data capture, wearable-device integration, questionnaire delivery, longitudinal tracking, and administrative tools that could support multiple studies at once.

When early external software-development efforts did not produce a functional research solution, Dr. Holash took on the technical lead role and led creation of the ACTIVATION Health ecosystem.

What ACTIVATION Health Supports

ACTIVATION Health was built as a secure digital-health research environment for collecting passive activity data, patient-reported outcomes, and clinical research metrics through University of Calgary-hosted infrastructure. The platform supports:

• Participant enrollment and informed consent
• Longitudinal mobility and activity tracking
• Wearable-device integration
• Questionnaire delivery for tools such as PROMIS
• Research-data management and administrative study tools
• Multiple concurrent clinical and trainee-led studies

The platform is designed for recovery science, including work in musculoskeletal oncology, sarcoma, metastatic bone disease, spine surgery, orthopaedics, and rehabilitation.

Translation and Growth

The initial ACTIVATION program helped support further grant development, including a $75,000 Alberta Spine Foundation research grant led by Dr. Fred Nicholls. The platform has also supported collaborative activities involving researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the University of Toronto.

The project later entered the Alberta SPARK Accelerator Program, providing mentorship around partnerships, commercialization, and translational research. Activation Health Corp. was co-founded to support long-term sustainability and translation of the technology.

By 2026, ACTIVATION Health had progressed from a research concept into a publicly available Apple App Store platform backed by secure research infrastructure. The work continues to support trainee projects, external collaborations, future grant applications, and conversations about multi-institutional digital-health deployment.

ACTIVATION Health reflects a broader direction for the Digital Athlete Lab: using physiology, software, and clinical collaboration to understand health and recovery where they actually happen.