ACTIVATION Health: Mobile Health Research Platform

Digital-health infrastructure for activity tracking, recovery science, and patient-reported outcomes

ACTIVATION began as a research program co-developed and co-led by Dr. John Holash and Dr. Joe Kenal to investigate how mobile-health and wearable technologies can objectively monitor physical activity, recovery trajectories, and health outcomes in both clinical and healthy populations. The program has since grown into ACTIVATION Health, a secure digital-health research platform and translational initiative.

Project Overview

The ACTIVATION research program addresses critical gaps in understanding real-world recovery and quality of life outside traditional laboratory and clinic-based assessments. By combining passive activity tracking, wearable-device integration, clinical research metrics, and patient-reported outcomes, the platform creates a more comprehensive picture of recovery, function, and health across longitudinal studies.

Initial support came through a $20,000 McCaig Institute SPARK Grant, establishing a multidisciplinary collaboration linking kinesiology, orthopaedic surgery, oncology, rehabilitation medicine, and digital health research. The platform and research infrastructure later supported additional grant development, including a $75,000 Alberta Spine Foundation research grant led by Dr. Fred Nicholls.

Research Objectives

The program supports several linked objectives:

  1. Platform validation: Evaluate ACTIVATION Health for longitudinal activity tracking, patient engagement, and patient-reported outcome collection.

  2. PRO analysis: Study the Patient-Reported Outcome Measure Information System (PROMIS) and the Toronto Extremity Salvage Score (TESS) as tools for understanding recovery and function.

  3. Mobility correlations: Evaluate relationships between real-world mobility metrics, wearable-device data, and self-reported recovery outcomes.

  4. Clinical deployment: Support studies in sarcoma, metastatic bone disease, spine surgery, rehabilitation, and recovery science.

  5. Research infrastructure: Build scalable systems for participant enrollment, consent, questionnaire delivery, secure data management, and multi-study administration.

ACTIVATION Health Platform

As co-investigator, researcher, and technical lead, Dr. Holash designed the methodological and technical framework supporting the project. When early external software-development efforts did not produce a functional research solution, he led development of the ACTIVATION Health ecosystem.

The platform now supports:

  • Participant enrollment and informed consent
  • Secure University of Calgary-hosted data collection
  • Passive activity and longitudinal mobility tracking
  • Wearable-device integration
  • Questionnaire delivery and patient-reported outcome capture
  • Administrative study-management tools
  • Multiple concurrent research studies

By 2026, ACTIVATION Health had progressed from a grant-funded research concept into a publicly available digital-health platform distributed through the Apple App Store and supported by a robust research infrastructure.

Translation and Startup Development

The ACTIVATION program has grown beyond a single study into a translational digital-health initiative. The project was accepted into the Alberta SPARK Accelerator Program, providing mentorship and support for innovation, partnerships, commercialization, and multi-institutional deployment. Activation Health Corp. was co-founded to support long-term sustainability and translation of the technology.

The platform continues to support trainee projects, future grant applications, external collaborations, and discussions around broader institutional research deployment.

Research and Training Impact

  • Supported graduate, undergraduate, and trainee research projects
  • Created infrastructure for studies in rehabilitation, orthopaedics, oncology, and recovery science
  • Enabled collaborations involving clinical researchers, the Mayo Clinic, and the University of Toronto
  • Provided opportunities for student software development, research implementation, and entrepreneurial training through Hunter Hub programming
  • Demonstrated how seed funding can grow into sustainable digital-health research infrastructure

Project Team

This collaborative project brings together expertise from:

  • Digital Athlete Lab (Faculty of Kinesiology)
  • Cumming School of Medicine
  • McCaig Institute for Bone and Joint Health
  • Alberta Health Services
  • Activation Health Corp.
  • Clinical and institutional collaborators in orthopaedic surgery, oncology, rehabilitation medicine, and digital health