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Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research

Date Submitted: Jun 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Sep 14, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 1, 2020

The final, peer-reviewed published version of this preprint can be found here:

Diagnostic Accuracy of Web-Based COVID-19 Symptom Checkers: Comparison Study

Munsch N, Martin A, Gruarin S, Nateqi J, Abdarahmane I, Knapp B

Diagnostic Accuracy of Web-Based COVID-19 Symptom Checkers: Comparison Study

J Med Internet Res 2020;22(10):e21299

DOI: 10.2196/21299

PMID: 33001828

PMCID: 7541039

Online COVID-19 Symptom Checkers: Comparison Study

  • Nicolas Munsch; 
  • Alistair Martin; 
  • Stefanie Gruarin; 
  • Jama Nateqi; 
  • Isselmou Abdarahmane; 
  • Bernhard Knapp

ABSTRACT

Background:

A large number of online COVID-19 symptom checkers and chatbots have been developed but anecdotal evidence suggests that their conclusions are highly variable. To our knowledge, no study has evaluated the accuracy of COVID-19 symptom checkers in a statistically rigorous manner.

Objective:

The aim of this study is to provide diagnostic accuracy evaluations of online COVID-19 symptom checkers.

Methods:

We evaluated 10 different COVID-19 symptom checkers screening 50 COVID-19 case reports alongside 410 non-COVID-19 control cases.

Results:

The symptom checker Symptoma performs best (F1=0.92), followed by Infermedica (F1=0.80), Cleveland Clinic (F1=0.76), Providence (F1=0.75), Your.MD (F1=0.72), CDC (F1=0.71), Babylon (F1=0.70), Apple (F1=0.70), Ada (F1=0.42) and Docyet (F1=0.27).

Conclusions:

We find that the number of correctly assessed cases varies considerably between different symptom checkers, with Symptoma showing the overall best performance.


 Citation

Please cite as:

Munsch N, Martin A, Gruarin S, Nateqi J, Abdarahmane I, Knapp B

Diagnostic Accuracy of Web-Based COVID-19 Symptom Checkers: Comparison Study

J Med Internet Res 2020;22(10):e21299

DOI: 10.2196/21299

PMID: 33001828

PMCID: 7541039

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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.

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