Health Monitors and COVID-19
Do you have a Fitbit that you use regularly? Does it track your heart rate? How about an Apple Watch? Can it track your temperature? Blood pressure? Millions of people use those types of devices. Think of the potential for collecting data. It could be millions of data points per second.
I recently wrote about a study that integrated data collected from smartphones with health reminders and recommendations to see whether texts and emails could impact behavior. I didn’t believe they could, based on the limited data used by the computer to send recommendations. That was really an issue of total numbers of subjects; they had 300 and they needed 300,000 or better yet, 3,000,000.
These new studies overcome the problem of limited subjects. Several research groups are collecting data anonymously from fitness devices to find out if they can predict when someone has the COVID-19 virus. What could those devices track that might predict a viral infection? Heart rate, for one. I’ll talk about that study on Thursday.
What are you prepared to do today?
