Predicting COVID-19 with Wearables

The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast

Dr. Zahi Fayad and Dr. Robert Hirten return to continue their discussion on wearable technology. This episode revolves around the study Dr. Fayad and Dr. Hirten performed to find out if wearable devices can identify and predict COVID-19. They discuss some of the struggles they had being “largely restricted in the data they could collect”. Their findings have the potential to be ground-breaking and showed “there are significant changes in your heart rate variability over 24 hours, which allows us to diagnose someone 7 days before a nasal swab”. To finish the episode, they discuss the potential to expand the study in the future, stating “The more you make these available to the researchers, the more helpful they will be to the healthcare biomedical research community”. Read more about their study at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.06.20226803v1.full-text