Two cases of COVID-19 monitored by a wearable biosensor-a case report

Abstract

Wearable devices have gained popularity in recent years for tracking metrics related to personal health and well-being such as vital signs, motion, and sleep. Wearable devices are considered to have a very high potential value for detecting, monitoring, and controlling the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19, based on their ability to collect data in a non-invasive and contactless manner. With the Biostrap wrist-worn device (Biostrap USA LLC, Duarte, CA, USA), a commercially available, clinically validated wearable device that uses photoplethysmography to automatically record physiological data such as resting heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), and arterial stiffness (AS), we collected biometric data from 933 subjects. We present two cases of patients who have tested positive for the presence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2), a 24-year-old man experiencing major symptoms and another a 49-year-old man with only intermittent fatigue, and show the marked changes in biometric measurements around dates of symptom onset and positive test. We observed a pattern of sustained respiratory rate elevation in both patients, punctuated by a sharp spike in heart rate and decreased AS. The latter contradicted our expectation that during the onset of symptoms of COVID-19, an increase in AS might occur.