Germany Wants to Track Coronavirus Outbreaks with Smartwatches

With over 103,000 cases as of Tuesday morning, Germany has the world’s fourth largest number of Covid-19 cases after the US, Spain, and Italy. Nevertheless, Germany’s nearly 1,900 Covid-19 deaths puts the country in tenth place for coronavirus fatalities.

The relatively low death-rate is mainly due to the early implementation of testing protocols that allowed the infected to be identified, isolated and treated them without delay.

Extensive screening of Covid-19 is still on-going along now with the launch of a program that would allow the collection of data related to coronavirus through the use of wearable devices that are available in the App Store and Google Play.

Health parameters, like sleep data, pulse or body temperature (which would be remotely monitored using health apps) from volunteers’ citizens would be collected anonymously.  It would help to identify signs of a new Covid-19 outbreak as well as mapping emerging virus hotspots throughout the territory. It is also seen as an efficient way of keeping tabs on the virus once containment and social distancing is over.

Access to data from across the country would therefore provide valuable input for epidemiologists and authorities who could assess and contain risks of new outbreaks.

Lothar Wieler, Head of Robert Koch Institute that coordinates the country’s coronavirus crisis management declared:

“If the sample is big enough to capture enough symptomatic patients, that would help us to draw conclusions on how infections are spreading and whether containment measures are working.”

Thryve, a Berlin based Healthtech startup has developed The Corona Data Donation App. They guarantee that the health monitoring tracker will only collect data such as age, sex, postcode and basic body data to analyse whether they are symptomatic of the flu-like illness.

Edited by Aude Ghespière