COVID Collab: Wearables to Monitor COVID
Mobile health (mHealth) continuous remote monitoring techniques can be used to provide a detailed characterisation of a person’s physiology, environment, quality-of-life, and functional level with minimal burden using smart phones and consumer wearable devices. Biosignals, including heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, respiration rate, sleep, exercise, fatigue and activity, can be continually passively recorded while simultaneously gathering labelling context data through app-delivered questionnaires.
Access to wearable fitness tracker data provides a fine-grained, continuous and objective view of a person’s ongoing state, tracking fluctuations and exacerbations, as well as providing a window into the past allowing us to view a participant’s pre-enrolment, pre-pandemic and pre-infection state. This view of a person’s historical healthy state allows us to more clearly compare how and when changes to behaviour and physical and mental health occur in response to COVID infection, persistent symptoms, and the pandemic in general. It allows us to understand what pre-disease characteristics are predictive of long COVID e.g. are those people that are physically fit less likely to develop long COVID, as well as an opportunity for self-management.
Covid Collab [https://covid-collab.org] is a crowd-sourced mHealth study, using our Mass Sci app and open-source RADAR-Base platform [https://radar-base.org], which invites participants to self enrol and passively donate their mobile (e.g. location to derive measures of mobility) and wearable data while actively providing regular updates on mental health, COVID-19 symptomatology and diagnosis. Participants are consented through the app for recontact, for linkage to other studies or datasets. Participants who have already experienced COVID-19 and long COVID can retrospectively donate useful device data covering the entire time window of interest. In partnership with Fitbit, and leveraging our previous experience and existing infrastructure in large-scale wearable and mHealth remote monitoring, we have recruited 7000 participants to date.
n=15k Current participants (March 2021)
