LONDON, Jan 16
(Reuters) - The Fitbit on your wrist not only counts your steps and minutes of
sleep, it can also help tell if you’re coming down with the flu - and warn
health authorities to get ready to help.
A study in the United
States has found that heart rate and sleep data from wearable fitness tracker
watches can predict and alert public health officials to real-time outbreaks of
flu more accurately than current surveillance methods.
The study used data from
more than 47,000 Fitbit users in five U.S. states. The results, published in
The Lancet Digital Health journal, showed that by using Fitbit data, state-wide
predictions of flu outbreaks were improved and accelerated.
The World Health Organization
estimates that as many as 650,000 people worldwide die of respiratory diseases
linked to seasonal flu each year.
Traditional
surveillance reporting takes up to three weeks, meaning response measures -
such as deploying vaccines or anti-virals and advising patients to stay at home
- can often lag.
“Responding more
quickly to influenza outbreaks can prevent further spread and infection, and we
were curious to see if sensor data could improve real-time surveillance,” said
Jennifer Radin, who co-led that study at the U.S. Scripps Research
Translational Institute.
Previous studies using
crowd-sourced data - such as Google Flu Trends and Twitter - have experienced
variable success, partly, experts say, because it is impossible to separate out
behavior of people with flu from people who search online about it due to more
media and public attention during outbreaks.
For this study,
Radin’s team de-identified data from 200,000 people whose Fitbits tracked
activity, heart rate and sleep for at least 60 days during the March 2016 to
March 2018 study period. From the 200,000, 47,248 users from California, Texas,
New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania wore a Fitbit consistently during the
period. The average age was 43 and 60% were female.
Users’ resting heart
rate and sleep duration were monitored and flagged as abnormal if the average
weekly heart rate was significantly above their overall average and their
weekly average sleep was not below their overall average.
This data was compared
to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s weekly estimates for flu-like
illness.
Rosalind Eggo, a
public health expert at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine,
said the study suggests fitness trackers hold some promise as a disease surveillance
tool.
But she said more work
is needed “to gauge how reliable these data are over time, how specific these
measurements are for flu, and how representative Fitbit users are of the whole
population”.
Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Mark Heinrich
Our Standards:The Thomson
Reuters Trust Principles.
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