Covid-19 causes repertory problems that affect the blood oxygen levels and resting pulse rate.
Wearable devices that measure your resting heart rate—made by Apple, Fitbit, Garmin, and others—might help scientists spot viral outbreaks, and also give you more insight into your own health.
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Science Friday podcast
Monitoring Your Pandemic Health, From Your Home New at-home tests and health monitoring devices may give a new picture of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the keys to managing the COVID-19 epidemic is getting access to accurate data, from lots of people and lots of communities. That data helps define the boundaries of the pandemic, from who’s sick and who’s not, to the locations of hotspots, to trying to understand the hidden medical effects of the virus.
In recent weeks, the FDA has given the go-ahead to several tests for COVID-19 that can be performed remotely, from your own home. Such tests could help greatly expand testing capacity, an essential part of plans for recovery—but only if the tests are sensitive and reliable. Researchers are also working to develop other ways of using tech to monitor the outbreak, from heart rate monitors in smartwatches to sampling community sewage plants for evidence of the virus.
Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, joins Ira to talk about some of the technology that could be brought to bear to get a better picture of the COVID-19 pandemic.
