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 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.
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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)
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