One ring to fight virus

A prominent Las Vegas casino operator is embarking on a novel strategy to fight coronavirus among its staff, giving them wearable “smart rings” that can detect infection before symptoms occur.

Las Vegas Sands, which owns the Venetian and Palazzo resorts, bought 1000 “smart rings” from Oura, a Finnish wearable technology start-up, after two studies indicated that they can accurately predict the onset of Covid-19 symptoms.

It will be the first big US company to deploy such pre-symptomatic virus detection devices internally.

Rob Goldstein, Sands’ president, said if the pilot programme goes well, he anticipates purchasing a US$300 wearable for each of his 9300 employees.

The Oura ring was originally designed as a fashionable sleep-tracker, counting Prince Harry and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey among its more than 150,000 customers. The Oura ring detects body temperature in addition to heart rate, heart rate volatility and respiratory rate.

When a person is infected by coronavirus, the body’s efforts to fight back result in a series of patterns that the Oura ring can detect with “unparalleled” accuracy, said Dr Ali Rezai, director of the Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute at West Virginia University.

Dr Rezai has been conducting a study of 900 frontline workers over the past two months and determined that the Oura ring can detect the presence of the virus up to three days before symptoms appear.

“Studies show that two days before the first onset of any symptoms, you’re actually contagious and shedding the virus,” he said.

Subtle changes in temperature, sleep patterns and heart rate detected by Oura “allow us to have a behind-the-scenes understanding of disease coming on, when it’s imperceptible [to] you”, he said.

Dr Ben Smarr, a professor of data science at the University of California, San Diego, said research on more than 12,000 Oura users makes him “extremely confident” that wearers could build an early warning system for coronavirus.

To combat privacy concerns, the voluntary pilot at Sands will not allow the company to access employees’ metrics directly. Wearers will have real-time access to their own “Risk Score”, while Sands’ human resources team will only be alerted if an individual’s patterns indicate a high risk of developing Covid symptoms.

The hope is that the ring will help Sands determine who should be advised to quarantine and get a test, given limited capacity to check every employee daily.