After the Fitbit, it’s the ‘Sickbit’
App will tell you you’re set to get f lu – 12 hours before your f irst sneeze
AN APP that can warn you up to half a day in advance that you’re going to become ill is being developed by scientists.
It uses information from wearable health trackers which monitor heart rate and body temperature via the likes of an Apple Watch, to tell individuals they are about to suffer an illness such as the flu.
A team at California’s Stanford University is working on the app, after testing the theory on 43 volunteers who wore a smartwatch for up to 11 months.
Project leader Prof. Michael Snyder said: ‘We discovered that just as people are starting to get sick, their heart rate and skin temperature go up, and their blood oxygen level goes down.
‘Our app gives you a first alert that something is not quite right – because these physiological changes happen before you even notice you are ill.’ Resting heart rate went up by five to ten per cent, compared with the individual’s normal level, he said, while they also experienced more occasions when it rose high.
The team’s research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, concluded that if a person’s heartbeat was raised for two hours or more, that was ‘a good signal you’re not quite right’.
Prof. Snyder, a leading geneticist, said it gave up to half a day’s notice of imminent illness. He believes it would help healthy people plan better in the event of getting the flu, and recover quicker.
‘You might look at your monitor, and it’ll say “I think you are coming down with something – perhaps you shouldn’t go out dancing tonight. Stay at home and have chicken soup instead”,’ he said. But the bigger benefit could come in helping track the health of the elderly, or those with chronic health problems such as diabetes – acting as an early warning system for the individual themselves, loved ones, or medics.
‘I’d like my mum to have one, so I could keep tabs on her health from 3,000 miles away,’ said Prof. Snyder.
He came up with the idea while testing whether commercially available wearable trackers did indeed provide reliable health data – and discovered he was able to self-diagnose that he had picked up a serious bacterial infection.
The Stanford study spotted eight out of eight infections suffered by the volunteers over its course, although Prof Snyder conceded bigger trials were needed.
He said it would be ‘a couple of years’ before an app is available.