Your Fitbit Might Help Track the Path of Covid-19
Researchers have known for years that wearables could be useful for detecting illness. Now they’re exploring whether fitness devices could help track and even contain Covid-19.
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As a runner, I live by my fitness tracker data — not just to record pace and distance, but to determine how I slept the night before, measure how recovered my body is from my last workout, and see how my training is progressing. I check my data every morning when I wake up, and after every run.
In January, I noticed that my resting heart rate had, out of nowhere, jumped 10 points. I knew that meant my body was working harder than normal, as if I were sick, although I didn’t have any typical cold symptoms, like a runny nose, congestion, or sneezing — just a tightness in my chest and slight cough that could easily be attributed to running in dry air and subfreezing Colorado temps. But I was convinced the change in my data meant something was wrong with me that might derail my marathon training.
After a physical exam, my doctor ruled out anything more serious than the common cold and recommended over-the-counter meds — plus ditching my watch for a few days to prevent me from getting caught in the minutiae of my metrics.
But it turns out, I may not have been totally off base obsessing over what those metrics meant about my well-being. Researchers have seen the potential in using wearables to track physiological issues and illnesses since the original tracker, Fitbit, debuted in 2009. Now they’re hoping to use the massive amounts of continuous data recorded by wearers to track and predict cases of Covid-19.
“Every single time someone got sick with a viral infection, we could pick up their heart rate increasing well before they were symptomatic.”
Last year, in a study of 109 people using wearables, researchers uncovered — using clinical measures, like blood and urine tests, in addition to heart rate and skin temperature data from the wearables — more than 67 previously undetected issues like infections, diabetes, lymphoma, heart defects…
