Fitbit Launches COVID-19 mHealth Study With US Army, Northwell Health

New York’s Northwell Health system will be giving several thousand Fitbits to employees as part of a telehealth study aimed at proving the value of mHealth wearables in detecting COVID-19.

The study is part of a larger partnership between Fitbit and the US Army, whose Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) is giving the company roughly $2.5 million to develop a connected health platform capable of detecting COVID-19 in the nation’s military.

It’s one of many aimed at using telemedicine platforms and mHealth tools to identify symptoms before they become apparent - and it comes as both Europe and the US are seeing rapidly increasing infection rates.

“The Department of Defense seeks rapid, accurate wearable solutions to identify and isolate pre-symptomatic COVID-19 cases and help track and prevent the spread of the virus,” Commander Christopher Steele, director of the USAMROC’s Military Operational Medicine Research Program, said in a press release issued today. “Wearable technologies, valuable data metrics and potentially rapid scaling solutions for broad availability create ideal conditions for military and industry partnerships in the consumer wearable space.”

“Our research shows that our bodies start to fight the disease before more visible symptoms appear and we believe Fitbit can reliably detect those signals, giving us an incredible opportunity to get ahead of this and help alert people that they could be sick before they unknowingly spread it to others,” added Amy McDonough, general manager and senior vice president of Fitbit Health Solutions.

Fitbit and Northwell Health will be coordinating their study through the health system’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research. Officials say that by monitoring health system employees, they hope to develop an algorithm that would detect COVID-19.

“The combination of Feinstein Institutes’ research expertise, Northwell Health’s COVID-19 testing capabilities and Fitbit’s promising algorithm in development presents a unique opportunity to accelerate early detection of COVID-19, particularly for frontline care workers,” Karina Davidson, PhD, Feinstein’s senior vice president, said in the press release. “Based on our learnings, we aim to work together to advise other large-scale health systems on this approach to minimizing the spread of COVID-19.”

Fitbit launched its own study in May to track the value of wearables in detecting the virus. In August the company reported that, based on data from more than 100,000 participants, it could create an algorithm that would be 70 percent accurate in detecting COVID-19 before symptoms were apparent to the user.

“This is important because people can transmit the virus before they realize they have symptoms or when they have no symptoms at all,” Conor Heneghan, the company’s director of research and algorithms, said in a blog on the company’s website. “If we can let people know they should get tested a day before symptoms begin, they can isolate and seek care sooner, helping to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”

Fitbit also formed a consortium in June with the Scripps Research Translational Institute and Stanford Health to aggregate data from various programs using mHealth technology.

Among the projects they’re watching are DETECT, a national effort launched by SRTI in March to gather data from smartwatches and activity trackers to analyze how activity, heart rate, sleep patterns and other connected health data can be integrated into a public health surveillance program, and the COVID-19 Wearables Study launched that same month by the Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab, which aims to determine whether data gathered from wearables, including heart rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen saturation, can be used to predict the onset of a disease like COVID-19 before symptoms are evident.

In addition, the Department of Defense announced in May that it is working with mHealth company physIQ to gather data from patients in military hospitals across the country, with the hope of developing newer and better treatments addressing the pandemic. And Evidation Health is using funding from the Bill Gates Foundation and the Health and Human Services Department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in a remote patient monitoring project that is gathering sleep and activity data and self-reported symptoms from 300 people at high risk of acquiring the coronavirus.