Ask HN: Can Apple watch be used to detect Corona? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can Apple watch be used to detect Corona?

5 pointsblackoil3 comments

Just a curiosity. Can Apple watch or a similar medical band be used to detect Corona infection before symptoms start showing? Idea is to ask everyone remotely in contact with an infected person or everyone who is coming from abroad. It feeds by minute data to some central service which uses AI/ML or some boring data analysis to detect if a person is infected. Assumption is virus may have some subtle impact on BP, sweating, heart beats or oxygen level anything that can be detected by such a band couple of days before symptoms are human observable.

Is the idea already tested, in testing? or is it batshit crazy (⌐■_■)?

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There are zillions of things that impact BP, sweating, heart beats or oxygen level (being in love, for example, to mention a cause from the other end of the spectrum), and they heavily vary during the day. It will at best be very, very hard to filter them out, and likely will require having months of measurements for each person.

If you try hard enough I would guess you can get statistically significant data out of it in areas where a significant portion of the public is infected, but it’s a huge step from there to diagnostically significant data, with both few enough false positives and few enough false negatives.

Get a simple pulse oximeter.

Telemonitoring symptomatic coronavirus patients requires thermometer and pulse oximeter.

Google

https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/clinical-care/how-health-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/hospitals-using-digital-tool...

> Patients who are identified as likely positive for COVID-19 in an emergency department but are not admitted are being sent home with a thermometer and pulse oximeter to monitor their symptoms at home under the supervision of the health system's telehealth team.

When temperature raises and blood oxygenation drops you should be rushed to ICU to save your life.

I am sure one can make fancy iOS app for that.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652047 for some discussion on using heart rate

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