mHealth Project to Crowdsource Consumer Data for Coronavirus Research
UCSF researchers are deploying an mHealth app to gather information on daily health habits. They're hoping to gain insight on how behaviors might affect the course of the virus or outcomes in those who are infected.
mHealth researchers are using smartphones to crowdsource Coronavirus research.
The University of California at San Francisco has launched COVID-19 Citizen Science (CCS), a project aimed at gathering insights from people around the world on the virus. Participants are being asked to download an mHealth app, complete a survey about their daily health habits, complete a weekly follow-up survey and pass it on to friends.
“We are asking each participant to share the link to recruit at least five others,” Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, a professor at UCSF’s Department of Medicine and the project’s co-leader, said in a press release. “We want to demonstrate that the number of people signing up for this scientific study and contributing their data can increase exponentially, faster than the disease itself.”
Participants will also be able to provide continuous GPS data and information from mHealth wearables, such as Fitbit activity bands and smartwatches.
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The program is one of several aimed at using connected health platforms to study the pandemic. Just down the highway in San Diego, the Scripps Research Translational Institute has launched a project aimed at measuring the value of mHealth wearables in detecting emerging viral outbreaks.
Another project launched out of UCSF, meanwhile, is using mHealth wearables to monitor frontline care workers who’ve been exposed to the virus.
Marcos is no stranger to telehealth projects. In 2013 he helped to launch the Health eHeart Study, which used online and mHealth tools to collect and analyze heart health data. That, in turn, led to the launch of a study in 2018 that combined mHealth wearables with AI to determine whether a cardiac monitoring platform could help detect early signs of diabetes.
Marcos says CCS aims to identify behaviors, influences and factors that might affect the course of the virus and outcomes after infection, and he feels the study could be the largest-ever prospective epidemiological study of infectious diseases.
“Social distancing keeps many protected,” he said, “but joining together to contribute data will help us beat this thing.”