Fighting COVID-19 with data: global initiatives and partnerships to help track & inform
We have recently joined forces with groups leading initiatives to track the spread of the virus and allow users to choose to voluntarily opt-in to help track infectious disease outbreaks. This is meant to help researchers improve treatments while also informing users. See below for more on the global and localized initiatives.
US, Canada & Mexico
Partnering with Boston Children’s Hospital by integrating their “Covid Near You” survey directly into the Health Mate app. Anonymized data from the voluntary survey will be sent to Boston Children's Hospital and used to conduct epidemiological studies and visualize the spread of symptoms associated with COVID-19. The survey quickly and easily allows users to report symptoms or testing activity, and is followed by health recommendations depending on the declared symptoms.
US
Partnering with Scripps Research and their MyDataHelps app so US users can opt-in to a study of users that seeks to improve real-time surveillance of contagious respiratory illnesses. Scripps seeks to determine if individual tracking of changes in metrics such as heart rate, activity, sleep, can provide an early indication of an illness.
France
Withings has partnered with the Digital Alliance and their website MaladieCoronavirus.fr run by The Institut Pasteur. They intend to carry out the epidemiological study based on the answers to the questionnaire that is available in Health Mate, and they stand to benefit from our additional physiological data.
Germany
We have partnered with Robert Koch Institute to launch Withings devices into the Corona Data Donation app (Corona Dataspende). Available in Germany, this encourages Germans to opt-in to share their data from their activity trackers to help monitor the spread of COVID-19 and track whether measures to contain the virus are working.
Other studies
We are also currently taking part in several research projects that utilize our devices in order to better understand how variations in heart rate, ECG and respiratory disturbances during the night may signal the onset of the disease, and how these metrics progress during its progression.