New mHealth Study Uses Wearables to Identify COVID-19 Symptoms Early

An mHealth data company is working to develop software that would enable providers to identify people with COVID-19 symptoms through remote patient monitoring platforms.

California-based 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) to launch the telehealth project, which will gather sleep and activity data and self-reported symptoms from 300 people at high risk of acquiring the coronavirus.

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“Many infected individuals are asymptomatic but still able to spread the virus, making efforts to prevent and slow transmission of COVID-19 difficult,” Luca Foschini, PhD, Evidation’s co-founder and chief data scientist, said in a press release. “This initiative will use novel behavioral and physiological data to more effectively identify when and where people may contract COVID-19, and can potentially enable real-time interventions to limit spread and monitor outcomes.”

Evidation Health, a digital health company launched out of the Stanford Health-GE Ventures incubator, has been involved in several mHealth projects over the past few years, including partnerships with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Ochsner Health and Eli Lilly. The company has worked with BARDA in the past on a study of people with respiratory infections and is in the midst of a nationwide study, called COVID-19 Pulse, that tracks attitudes during the pandemic.

This new project is one of several using mHealth wearables and telemedicine platforms to identify, track and treat COVID-19 patients.

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. And Stanford Health and the Scripps Research Translational Institute are joining forces with Fitbit on a consortium to study how telehealth can be applied to research projects targeting the pandemic.

In March, San Diego-based SRTI launched DETECT, a national effort 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. Participants are asked to upload their data through the MyDataHelps app.

“In light of the ongoing flu season and the global pandemic of COVID-19, we see enormous opportunity to enhance disease tracking for improved population health,” said Jennifer Radin, PhD, an SRTI epidemiologist who is leading the study. “One way to do this is to leverage and analyze the rich health data that’s already being collected by the millions of Americans who regularly use wearable devices.”

At around the same time, the Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab launched the COVID-19 Wearables Study, 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.

“The ability to self-monitor and be informed of health status will empower Americans in their decisions to help slow the spread of this pandemic and improve health outcomes for people with COVID-19,” BARDA’s acting director, Gary Disbrow, PhD, said in the press release announcing its partnership with Evidation Health. “This pilot study is not only an early step in demonstrating the utility of models developed using person-generated health data but also may provide data to better understand the varied symptoms of COVID-19.”