Smart ring could detect signs of Covid-19 before wearers feel symptoms

A smart ring that monitors the wearer’s temperature can reliably detect the onset of fever, suggesting it could become a valuable tool in predicting the start of Covid-19 symptoms.

The ring, manufactured by Finnish company Oura, monitors a person’s continuous temperature, heart rate, respiration rate and activity while worn on a finger.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego, UC San Francisco and MIT Lincoln Lab studied data from 50 people reporting the virus and a wider study of 65,000 people who had worn the ring in the hope of developing an algorithm to predict when a patient will develop a fever, cough or fatigue: all symptoms of Covid-19.

Curbing the spread

The teams expect to successfully create the algorithm by the end of the year and hope it will help health officials to curb the spread of the virus, according to the report, published in journal Scientific Reports.

“If wearables allow us to detect Covid-19 early, people can begin physical isolation practices and obtain testing so as to reduce the spread of the virus,” said Ashley Mason, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UC San Francisco.

“In this way, an ounce of prevention may be worth even more than a pound of cure.”

Continuous monitoring for fever

Wearing the ring throughout the day and night would help the researchers to monitor a person’s temperature continually and aid them in identifying fever peaks more accurately – previously a key problem in identifying Covid-19.

Temperature spot checks are not effective for identifying the virus, demonstrating the importance of continuous data collection, said Benjamin Smarr, the paper’s corresponding author and a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and the Halicioglu Data Sciences Institute at UC San Diego.

Prof Smarr and his colleagues observed how patients often developed a fever before they reported symptoms, which he said supports the hypothesis that some fever-like events may go unreported or unnoticed without being “truly asymptomatic“.

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“Wearables, therefore, may contribute to identifying rates of asymptomatic [illness] as opposed to unreported illness, [which is] of special importance in the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said.

The team are continuing their efforts to recruit a pool of study participants from diverse backgrounds that adequately reflects the US population.

“We need to make sure that our algorithms work for everyone,” Prof Smarr added.

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