Day and night, fitbit watch owners wear their watches and fitness trackers which gives the company tons of health data. Fitbit is now conducting a study to determine if all of those data can be used to diagnose covid-19 before any observable symptoms including fever and cough— even begin.
The Fitbit Covid-19 Test, launched today, would gather data from volunteers to develop an algorithm that could eventually make its way into a covid-19 diagnostic tool directly on Fitbit devices. Scripps and Stanford Medicine are already using fitbit data in research into whether wearable devices can detect covid-19. But those studies aren’t used to build diagnostic algorithms the way it will be the company’s own test.
Fitbit owners in the U.S. and Canada can sign up for the study in the Fitbit app on their smartphones. The company is looking specifically for people over 21 who either currently have covid-19 or have recovered from the virus, or those who have flu symptoms, to contribute data to the study. Those folks will be asked to complete a questionnaire about their symptoms and medical history, and then Fitbit will monitor their data as part of the study.
For now, it’s unclear whether a fitness tracker or smartwatch can detectcovid-19 until symptoms occur, but the studies already underway are looking at the correlation between blood oxygenation rates, respiratory rate, and heart rate, among other metrics, to see if those levels change dramatically enough that a system can warn you that you’ve probably contracted the novel coronavirus.
Fitbit also conducts its own atrial fibrillation (or irregular heart rhythm) test to see if its smartwatches can diagnose the disease which contributes to hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes a year. The findings of that report will be forwarded to the United States Food and Drug Administration in future Fitbit devices as part of an application for approval of the diagnostic feature.
Fitbit hasn’t offered a timeline as to when they expect to wrap the covid-19 study or publish results, or whether they will seek FDA clearance for a coronavirus diagnostic feature.
It’s worth noting that Google is close to acquiring Fitbit in a $2.1 billion deal that is pending regulatory approval. Fitbit users will have to decide whether the privacy concerns are worth the trade-off of contributing to an algorithm that can save lives.
