Smartwatch Can Detect COVID-19 At An Early Presymptomatic Stage

Tittle of this article might have raised many questions in your mind that how a smartwatch can detect COVID-19 symptoms and that too in early stages. I was also surprised when I read this research article in Research Gate website. I will share the link of this research article at the end of this article.

Early Detection Of COVID-19 Using A Smartwatch, this research was conducted at Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, USA and The Centre for RNA Science and Therapeutics, Case Western University, USA in July 2020.

In this article I will briefly explain you how they have conducted this study and what was the result of this research.

Research Objective

The main aim of this study was to find out that how effective these wearable devices are in detection of COVID-19 symptoms. As you all know smart watches can monitor your health by keeping a track on various health vitals such as heart rate, sleep patterns, steps, various activities and many more.

An early detection of COVID-19 can help in preventing the spread of such an infectious disease is various people. If a person detects that he has COVID-19 per-symptoms then he can self isolate himself and can take medications to cure the disease in early stages. A pre detection of such a dangerous disease is highly beneficial.

Correlation 

The base of this research is the fact that the COVID-19 causes some changes in your heart rate, sleep patterns and daily activity. These health vitals can be detected easily using a smartwatch.

So in this study the research team has taken the heart rate, sleep pattern and daily steps data of 

more than 5000 people.

SmartWatches in Research

For this research more than 5000 people were enrolled in which the major smart watches used were from Fitbit, Apple Watch and Garmin. Some other brand smartwatches are also used. The main criteria was that those smart watch should detect those three main health vitals perfectly. 

Research Method

The health vitals of all the persons enrolled in this study are monitored using their smartwatch data and are analyse to make out a conclusion to detect the COVID-19 at early stages. 

The main health vital was heart rate and sleep patterns. Researchers observed that the RHR (Resting Heart Rate) and sleep patterns are highly affected during the disease. They monitored abnormalities in these two main parameters, resting heart rate and sleep patterns, against the data collected during the period in which the person was healthy.

On comparing the health vitals data of the persons involved in study, they have found out that the RHR and sleep patterns of a person starts to get changed approx one week prior to any physical symptoms of COVID 19.

Final Result 

Researches in this study are capable of detecting the COVID-19 symptoms as early as 9 days earlier in most of the patients from the group who contracted the disease later on.

They have also created a method to detect the early symptoms by offline and online data.

This research can help in the development of new software features of your existing smartwatches that can alert you in such symptoms and you can take the necessary actions for that as soon as possible.

Can We Also Predict Using This Research Method?

In this method, the researchers has studied the resting heart rate and sleep patterns of the persons involved for a time period of 28 days and came to this conclusion. They have also developed a method to predict the COVID 19 symptoms online. But as this is an initial study, it may take some time to get the features on our current SmartWatches.

So, if you want to predict any COVID-19 symptoms of yours then you have to monitor your health vital data of last 2-3 months and compare those data with your daily health vital data. If you analyse these data daily, then you might be able to see the difference between a healthy day vitals and a sick day vitals.

Best of luck on your research👍

Research Article 

To read the complete details of this research you can check the Research Gate website, link is given below.

Click here to read the full research article.

Conclusion 

The smartwatch in your hand can be really helpful in monitoring your health vitals and detecting these diseases in an early stages. As the technology is enhancing day by day we will see many more great health features in our smartwatches which will change the future of health care industry.

Hope you have liked this article and information. 

Kindly share it with your friends and family.