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

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100601Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We separate wearable heart rate into cardiopulmonary, circadian, and other signals

  • Parameters from different physiological systems enable disease tracking

  • Individual signals change in distinct ways around COVID-19 symptom onset

  • Together, the parameter changes can distinguish healthy from infection periods

Summary

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.

Keywords

wearables
disease monitoring
circadian rhythms
heart rate
COVID-19
mathematical modeling

Data and code availability

  • The dataset from Mishra et al. is publicly available via the data availability link provided in the reference. All processed daily metrics used in this study can be found at the publicly available repository (https://github.com/mayercl/heart_rate_covid).

  • All code used in this study can be found at the publicly available repository (https://github.com/mayercl/heart_rate_covid).

  • Any additional information needed to reanalyze the data reported in this paper will be made available when possible by the lead contact upon request.

Cited by (0)

9

These authors contributed equally

10

Lead contact