Patterns (Jan 2021)
Characterizing COVID-19 and Influenza Illnesses in the Real World via Person-Generated Health Data
Abstract
Summary: The fight against COVID-19 is hindered by similarly presenting viral infections that may confound detection and monitoring. We examined person-generated health data (PGHD), consisting of survey and commercial wearable data from individuals' everyday lives, for 230 people who reported a COVID-19 diagnosis between March 30, 2020, and April 27, 2020 (n = 41 with wearable data). Compared with self-reported diagnosed flu cases from the same time frame (n = 426, 85 with wearable data) or pre-pandemic (n = 6,270, 1,265 with wearable data), COVID-19 patients reported a distinct symptom constellation that lasted longer (median of 12 versus 9 and 7 days, respectively) and peaked later after illness onset. Wearable data showed significant changes in daily steps and prevalence of anomalous resting heart rate measurements, of similar magnitudes for both the flu and COVID-19 cohorts. Our findings highlight the need to include flu comparator arms when evaluating PGHD applications aimed to be highly specific for COVID-19. The Bigger Picture: In this study, we integrate longitudinal symptoms reports and continuous data from commercial wearables to compare and contrast flu and COVID-19 presentations. We found that, while symptoms constellation between COVID-19 and flu have large overlap, symptoms are significantly more prolonged and severe for COVID-19 than for flu. Similarly, physiological data from commercial wearables showed increased resting heart rate around symptoms onset date that were more severe for COVID-19, but present in milder form for flu as well.Person-generated health data (PGHD), including data from smartphones and other connected sensors, has the potential to enable applications ranging from individual-level early warnings or population-level hotspot detection for COVID-19. However, for these applications to become a reality, our findings suggest that it is crucial to develop and validate them in the context of other potentially confounding respiratory illnesses, such as the flu.
