NIH to Use mHealth, Telehealth in Long COVID Research

Telehealth and mHealth will play an important role in a massive research project being launched by the National Institutes of Health to analyze the long-term effects of COVID-19.

The NIH announced this week that it will award more than $470 million in research grants to support more than 100 large-scale studies across the nation on how the virus affects long-term health and wellness. The Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative will be coordinated through New York University (NYU) Langone Health, which will issue sub-grants to at least 30 institutions conducting the research.

The projects aim to study why some people have prolonged symptoms or develop new or returning symptoms after the acute phase of infection from the virus. Often called “long COVID,” the most common symptoms include pain, headaches, fatigue, “brain fog,” shortness of breath, anxiety, depression, fever, chronic cough and sleep problems.

“We know some people have had their lives completely upended by the major long-term effects of COVID-19,” NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, said in a press release. “These studies will aim to determine the cause and find much needed answers to prevent this often-debilitating condition and help those who suffer move toward recovery.”

Many of the studies will use connected health platforms that include mHealth devices capturing data from participants at home and telehealth services that gather data from multiple locations and make it actionable for researchers. The use of technology allows researchers to standardize and centralize their efforts while gathering data from a diverse population in real time.

The research will include adult, pregnant and pediatric populations, as well as those in both the acute and post-acute phases of the virus. Along with data taken from wearables, apps and telehealth platforms, researchers will gather information from electronic health record platforms and tissue pathology. All told, they’ll be looking to address questions that include the incidence and prevalence of long-term effects from COVID-19, the range of symptoms, underlying causes, risk factors, outcomes and potential strategies for treatment and prevention.

“Given the range of symptoms that have been reported, intensive research using all available tools is necessary to understand what happens to stall recovery from this terrible virus,” Walter J. Koroshetz, MD, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and one of the RECOVER co-chairs, said in the press release. “Importantly, the tissue pathology studies in RECOVER will enable in depth studies of the virus’s effects on all body systems.”