Four-star Admiral Rachel Levine, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services's primary advisor on matters of national public health, tweeted on the RECOVERY Initiative:
The design of this federally funded project is to outfit 10,000 diverse patients with wristband devices generating data on heart rate, exercise, and other information shedding research-able light on Long COVID in real-time.
...For a condition defined by its symptoms, that kind of data promises to be useful…
And since long COVID is far from the only symptom-defined condition commonly preceded by a viral infection —cf. Chronic fatigue syndrome /myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME or ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia, among others— this kind of research technology and analysis potentially represents a breakthrough for a very large combined group of disabled patients: “Last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 7.5% of the adult U.S. population, or about 19 million people, had long COVID” alone, plus anywhere from 836,000 to 2.5 million with CFS/ME, and about 4 million adults —about 2% of the adult population— with Fibromyalgia (i.e., not counting youngsters) and more with other post-viral syndromes.
In similar research, the private cost of a smartwatch or fitness tracker inserted serious socioeconomic flaws into BYOD bring your own device study results that the RECOVER Initiative plans to avoid by using race/ethnicity, income, locale (e.g., rural), and and other demographics to identify eligible device recipients.
It builds on earlier research, including of the Scripps Institute Research Digital Trials Center which distributed 7,000 monitors to participants in the the All of Us study, a multi-site 5-years-and-counting project aiming to collect information from one million individuals.
Last month, Scripps researchers published a study on the tracking data that found a significant post-COVID-19 drop in physical activity. But the data is incomplete because many people can't always afford these devices. Most of the people in the study were "White, young and active"….
— a dearth of critically necessary diversity, IOW, that a distribution-only design might overcome.
Another criticism involves an obstructive kind of diversity: BYOD implicitly involves a range of manufacturers whose specs, registers, and outputs inevitably diverge on what they measure and how well, and the quality of connectivity. For example, what precisely is being measured in terms of a “step” activity — one step may differ greatly from one person to the next.
There are other unresolved obstructions to work out, too, before wearable devices become reliable across the board for healthcare, e.g., the absence of a universal language across electronic health records.
Hopefully, the objective, mass, collected measurement of this kind of research will clarify the true natures of long COVID and other “symptom-defined” illnesses (possibly even functional disorders), and end problematic subjective judgement on the part of healthcare professionals toward patients with these struggles.
Read more at the main source article at WebMD via Medscape, free/no paywall altho’ you might have to register, a healthmed encyclopedia (“Drugs & Diseases”), and so on, to add to your other resources. There are more DK diaries on long-covid here, fibromyalgia here, CFS-ME here, Mention of more symptom-defined illnesses welcome in the thread.