Fitbit, Scripps, and Stanford Announce Wearables Research Project

Your loyal wrist lieutenant may soon be moonlighting as an infectious disease field researcher.

Fitbit, the Scripps Translational Research Institute, and the Stanford University School of Medicine recently announced a research initiative to detect and track infectious diseases using data from wearables. That's not a trivial task—the standard wearable collects 250,000 data points a day, per a Stanford genetics professor.

• In January, Scripps published research showing it could accurately predict flu hotspots quicker than the CDC using 47,000 Fitbit users' anonymized data. Regionally, clusters of elevated resting heart rates corresponded with a higher concentration of patients with flu-like infections.

In other smart news

A few weeks ago, the German government launched an opt-in smartwatch "data donation" app to monitor the coronavirus's spread and assess the effectiveness of containment policies. And smart thermometer maker Kinsa has said its temperature data can identify COVID-19 hotspots faster than the CDC.

Zoom out: Though these data trails ≠ ironclad health signals, they could provide extra visibility into COVID-19's spread.