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Sports watch new weapon against corona: wearable tells who is ill

Most people use wearables such as the Apple Watch or Fitbit to count steps and measure heart rate, but the corona virus suddenly gives these types of devices a completely different application. Apple is working with an American university to investigate corona detection, and Fitbit reported their first research results in this area yesterday.

With a new algorithm, Fitbit has been able to recognize the virus in half of their users with covid-19 a day before they received complaints. Right now, the company is trying to improve accuracy, and they may want to start offering it to their users.


Doctor and microbiologist Jean-Luc Murk of the Elisabeth-Tweesteden Hospital is enthusiastic about the fact that large tech companies are using their knowledge to get the pandemic under control. He does think they don’t have enough data to be really accurate.

This makes it difficult to predict whether something is the corona virus or a flu virus, for example. “It’s not the best tool, but it’s incredibly useful,” he says. “And if everyone with the flu stays at home, you also prevent it from spreading.”


Measure more accurately

But not only large international tech companies are working on this, at UMC Utrecht, hard work is also being done on a wearable that can detect the corona virus. Where Fitbit mainly measures your heart rate, they are working in Utrecht on a bracelet that can measure many more things. In this way they hope to get it a lot more accurate than the tech companies.

“We try to get all the variables that are important for covid,” says Rick Grobbee, professor of clinical epidemiology at UMC Utrecht. “Body temperature is of course very important, but also respiratory rate, heart rate, skin moisture and respiratory movement such as coughing should be able to detect it all.”


For his research, Gobbee uses a wearable that is normally used to measure when women are fertile. With a subsidy of 10 million euros from the EU, they are now converting this into a corona detector.


Better than a human

A team of 40 people is now working on the device, which will soon be tested on 20,000 people. Another 10,000 people will be monitored for follow-up. “The idea is for a bracelet to do better than a human,” says Gobbee.

“If the bracelet only notices that you have corona when you also get complaints, it is not interesting. We want to be able to notice it days earlier.” That is the period when people do not know that they are sick, but they are contagious.


But will we all wear a bracelet like that? Gobbee does not think that it will come to that, but that it can mainly be used in a targeted manner. “I would initially think of high-risk groups, so people who run extra risks if it is discovered late. But also of people who work in healthcare.”

Gobbee is already receiving a lot of messages from people who work in healthcare asking when they can use it. “I don’t think the whole of the Netherlands will wear a bracelet, but really the group where the most profit can be made. So the people with the greatest risks or people who work in a place where the risk for others is great.”


No flu

The first big test starts on November 1, and Gobbee hopes with the knowledge they gather to make the wearable work more and more accurately. “The difference between complaints of corona and flu is sometimes only very subtle, that’s just the case. But as we have more data, we hope to be able to unravel those differences more and more.”


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