Israeli Study Shows Smartwatches Can Warn You Have COVID or a Migraine Is About to Happen

Special sensors allowed Tel Aviv University scientists to identify signs of COVID, flu and strep throat before patients' symptoms started. The next targets: migraines and high blood sugar

If your smartwatch warned you before symptoms appeared that you might have caught COVID, flu or strep throat, would you rush to be tested and start social-distancing? Researchers at Tel Aviv University are giving you this chance to be responsible.

Their study, published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health Europe, monitored 4,795 Israeli adults who every day for two years answered questions about their health and wore a smartwatch equipped with special sensors.

According to Yamin, research shows that during the pandemic, about 40 percent of COVID infections occurred about a day before the first symptoms. In around another 40 percent, the infected person passed the virus on during his or her first two days of symptoms.

During the study, one key metric measured by the smartwatch was the person's pulse, which was recorded every 15 seconds. The researchers also measured variations in heart rate, providing critical information on the performance of both the heart and the brain.

"The brain uses a lot of energy and constantly burns oxygen it gets from the heart and the blood, so any change in a person's activity or health is reflected in a change in the variability of the heart rate," Yamin says.

"During an illness, the body turns most of its attention to one system – the immune system that's fighting the disease, so the heart rate increases but remains fairly steady, and so the variability of the heart beat is small." This is a good way to spot a dangerous discrepancy.

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