Investigating the use of digital health technology to monitor COVID-19 and its effects: Protocol for Covid Collab, an observational study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The ubiquity of mobile phones and increasing use of wearable fitness trackers offers a wide-ranging window into people's health and well-being. There are clear advantages in using remote monitoring technologies to gain an insight into health, particularly under the shadow of the current COVID-19 pandemic. OBJECTIVE The Covid Collab study was set up to investigate the feasibility of identifying, monitoring, and understanding the stratification of COVID-19 infection and recovery through remote monitoring technologies. Additionally, we will assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated social measures on people's behaviour, physical health, and mental well-being. METHODS Participants remotely enrolled on the study through the Mass Science app to donate both historic and prospective mobile phone data, fitness tracking wearable data, and regular COVID-19 and mental health related surveys. Data is being recorded for the period of the pandemic, notably including pre, during and post acute infection phase. We plan to carry out analyses in several areas, covering symptomatology, risk factors, machine learning-based classification of illness, and trajectories of recovery, mental well-being, and activity. RESULTS Covid Collab is a crowdsourced study using remote monitoring technologies to investigate the COVID-19 pandemic. As of June 2021 there are over 17000 participants, largely from the United Kingdom, with enrolment ongoing. CONCLUSIONS This paper introduces a remotely enrolled crowd-sourced study recording mobile health data throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The data collected may help investigate a variety of areas, including COVID-19 disease progression, mental wellbeing during the pandemic, and adherence of remote, digitally enrolled participants.