Consumer-grade wearables identify changes in multiple physiological systems during COVID-19 disease progression.

Consumer-grade wearables are needed to track disease, especially in the ongoing pandemic, as they can monitor patients in real time. We show that decomposing heart rate from low-cost wearable technologies into signals from different systems can give a multidimensional description of physiological changes due to COVID-19 infection. We find that the separate physiological features of basal heart rate, heart rate response to physical activity, circadian variation in heart rate, and autocorrelation of heart rate are significantly altered and can classify symptomatic versus healthy periods. Increased heart rate and autocorrelation begin at symptom onset, while the heart rate response to activity increases soon after symptom onset and increases more in individuals exhibiting cough. Symptom onset is associated with a blunting of circadian variation in heart rate, as measured by the uncertainty in the phase estimate. This work establishes an innovative data analytic approach to monitor disease progression remotely using consumer-grade wearables.

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© 2022 The Authors.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

D.B.F. is the CSO of Arcascope, a company that makes circadian rhythms software. Both he and the University of Michigan are part owners of Arcascope. S.W.C., D.B.F., C.M., and M.T. receive research funding from an Arcascope NIH SBIR grant for a different research project. However, Arcascope did not sponsor the research presented herein. S.S. received Fitbit devices at reduced cost for the Intern Health Study. J.T., C.M., D.B.F., S.W.C., M.T. S.S., Y.F., and C.F. are inventors of intellectual property related to this work, for which the University of Michigan is pursuing intellectual property protections.