Our study shows that coronavirus can affect your biometrics for weeks after infection

At the start of the pandemic, researchers and wearable device makers scrambled to see if smartwatches and fitness trackers could It can detect COVID-19. It’s now 2023, and although wearables are showing promise in disease detection, not much progress has been made in the fight against COVID-19. But even as most people start to move on with their lives, some wearable device makers are still examining the data to see what they can learn from the past three years. Case in point: Oura smart ring maker just launched New study which found significant changes in the biometrics of its users up to 2.5 days before and 10 days after users reported having covid-19.

The study, which was published in a peer-reviewed journal Digital vital signs, looked at 838 Ora members with covid-19 infections as well as 20,267 members who had received the covid vaccine. Compare temperature, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate and sleep efficiency in the month before and after vaccination or injury. It also compared the physiological responses between variables, age groups, and vaccination status.

The findings largely support the existing literature when it comes to detecting coronavirus. For example, the physical response to the delta variants was much stronger than to the previous variants. Meanwhile, the vaccination triggered a similar but less severe response than the actual infection, and it lasted until four days after the injection. By the same token, vaccinated users had a less severe reaction than unvaccinated users. It was also found that the response is greater in users under the age of 35 compared to those over the age of 50.

“We were somewhat surprised to see responses in all of the biometrics we looked at,” said Hal Tilley, head of data science at Oura. the edge. Tilly went on to note that in this particular study, Ora was able to document the infection’s course in more detail than it had previously. For example, Tilly said that while temperature differences tend to return to baselines after about 10 days, changes in breathing rate and heart rate can persist for up to 20 days. While this cannot be considered evidence of prolonged coronavirus, it does suggest that it takes some people longer to return to their baseline biometric levels after infection.

“On average, we can clearly see symptoms extending for days, if not weeks, and in some cases up to a month after infection,” Tilley said.

This study has its limitations, however. It may have been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but that doesn’t make it a clinical study.

First of all, no volunteers were recruited, and it was not a randomized, double-blind trial, which is the gold standard in clinical research. According to Tily, data was pulled from existing Oura users according to it terms of use And privacy policy, which gives Aura the ability to use aggregated, anonymized data to develop new features or for research. The company has also identified users who have gotten covid or vaccines based on self-reported signs that users can use to add context to data from a given day.

Because Oura only looked at pooled averages of the data, Tily said it doesn’t require users to sign up as a more rigorous study involving individual data — like this one. Ora did with UCSD On temperature and covid-19. (Working with accumulated unknowns User data is a common practice among wearable companies. If you are an Oura user and that scares you, Oura allows you to get and delete your data under its own privacy policy.)

Tilly acknowledged these limitations when asked before the edgeexplaining that the aim of the study was not to provide any kind of diagnosis, draw definitive conclusions, or even pass FDA regulations.

“My real hope is that we get more people excited about the potential to use commercial wearable data to do large-scale disease surveillance,” Tilly said, noting that the benefit of consumer wearables is the sheer volume of data they generate, which can be useful in identifying large-scale trends. . For example, rather than focusing on warning individuals that they may become ill, consumer wearable devices may be more useful in passive monitoring of potential disease outbreaks in a given area to inform public health policies.

However, not everyone in the scientific community is keen on this Trust data from commercial devices. Compared to consumer technology, medical devices are subject to more stringent levels of calibration, sterilization, and data privacy. Consumer wearables are also more limited by their user bases. In this case, Oura’s data set may not accurately reflect certain racial or socioeconomic groups simply because it is a niche device that appeals to self-esteem nerds who can afford a $300 device with a $6 monthly subscription.

But even if scientists were to get fully engaged, I wouldn’t hold my breath at the possibility that consumer wearable devices would predict diseases anytime soon. Studies like this show that wearable devices can detect physiological changes after infection, but the next step is to see if these devices can distinguish influenza from coronavirus. Then there are a host of other factors that need to be taken into account, such as clinical validation, regulatory process, and whether this is something that will be restricted to specific wearable ecosystems.

Basically, the point of this kind of research is not to know how to deal with the coronavirus as we know it. You are likely to get a quick start in the next pandemic.

Photo by Victoria Song/The Verge