American Military News by Zachery Eanes - The News and Observer November 18, 2020
In March, when the pandemic was in its earliest days, COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, a ship home to more than 4,000 Navy sailors.
In just a matter of weeks, nearly 1,200 sailors tested positive and one died, after the virus spread silently from sailor to sailor.
Could there have been a way to stop it?
A new Defense Department study is bringing together the Research Triangle Park-based nonprofit RTI International and the wearable technology maker Garmin in hopes of finding one.
The study plans to monitor sailors living together in tight quarters aboard a ship. Each will be given a Garmin smartwatch loaded with an app designed by RTI that tracks their vitals, like heart rates, respiratory rates and oxygen saturation.
The app allows the watches to continuously monitor those rates at more frequent intervals than normal. Instead of tracking a person’s average heart rate every 15 seconds, a common interval among wearable devices, the app will give researchers insights into the time between each individual heartbeat.
Due to the way the body responds to respiratory disease like COVID-19 or influenza, the resting heart rate of a person can change when they are infected. A device that continually monitored those rates might create an early alert to isolate an individual before they become contagious.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/11/can-a-garmin-watch-help-with-covid-19-detection-rti-is-studying-sailors-to-find-out/
