(Yicai Global) Oct. 9 -- The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the country's National Health and Family Planning Commission have initiated the country's first project to create a Big Data health management platform through collaboration with other institutions, and aim to unveil China's first smart health device industrial standard by next year, the Beijing Daily reported today.

Once the standard is introduced, all data collected through smart health devices will be submitted to the new data platform and shared among medical institutions nationwide in order to make users' hospital visits more convenient.

Annual shipments of wearable smart devices exceeded 100 million globally for the first time in 2016, while in China, there are about 293 million potential smart health device customers and the industry is developing rapidly, the report said.

Current challenges facing health data collection include inaccuracies in data analysis and a lack of uniform industrial data standards.

The platform will pool data collected from smart hardware and create electronic archives in order to provide a basis for data sharing and disease management. It will also help smart hardware manufacturers to provide more accurate algorithms and optimize products.