Bridging the Governance Gap in Wearable Health Data: A Co-Regulatory Instrument for Information Polity
TL;DR
Good Data Service Practice is proposed as a co-regulatory policy instrument that operates as an institutional overlay to statutory regulation and offers digital-government decision-makers a transferable instrument for operationalising accountability, trust, and public values in data-intensive environments.
Abstract
Wearable health data, generated continuously by consumer and medical wearables and their companion platforms, have become a critical object of public-sector information governance. Yet the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and Taiwan's Personal Data Protection Act remain poorly aligned with continuous, platform-mediated, and cross-border data flows. This article proposes Good Data Service Practice (GDSP) as a co-regulatory policy instrument that operates as an institutional overlay to statutory regulation. Drawing on policy-tools theory and the information-polity literature, the study conducts a qualitative comparative legal-framework analysis of the three jurisdictions and identifies a shared pattern of instrumental misalignment between strong legal authority and weak operational governance capacity. By reframing data sovereignty as governed interoperability, GDSP offers digital-government decision-makers a transferable instrument for operationalising accountability, trust, and public values in data-intensive environments.