Medical Workers Wear Smart Ring to Detect Coronavirus Early

In San Francisco, about 2,000 emergency medical workers are detecting their temperature and other vitals with Oura's smart rings to avoid the prevalence of COVID-19. The data will be examined by Oura and researchers from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to create an algorithm that will predict the onset of the novel coronavirus and help mitigate the virus.

The smart ring is an attempt to identify people who have the new coronavirus early. The Oura rings will be given to ER medical workers who engage with patients who may have the coronavirus.

Aside from identifying early patterns of the onset of the coronavirus, it will also determine the progression and eventual healing from the infection.

Two sets of users are the frontline health workers and the general population.

The deadly virus that has a tallied 16,500 fatalities and infected over 3,800,000 people across the globe.

Other startups also continue to think of innovative ways to help out with ongoing efforts to contain the widespread disease.

Medical staff at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital are also donning the devices while Oura has asked about 150,000 other users to share their data with them.

The smart rings track a user's body temperature and heart rate, sleep patterns, and activity levels. Fever is an early symptom that commonly could indicate if the person is infected. An ongoing updated body temperature reading could tract fever very early. This is not enough to confirm a case of the coronavirus, but the purpose of the research study is to identify whether the series of readings Oura's smart ring tracks might, taken together along with other signals, be useful in an effort for early detection.

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Just last week, smart thermometers were added to the arsenal of combatting coronavirus.

One of the early symptoms of contracting COVID-19 is the rise in body temperature.

The Oura rings were originally released in 2019 as sleep monitoring devices. These smart rings are small wedding-band sized accessories that fit around the finger and can gather a series of biometric data.

This idea to utilize the rings was initially thought of Ashley Mason from UCSF who reached out to Oura CEO Harpreet Rai.

The program's short-term goal, according to Mason, is to help medical workers detect if they might be sick before experiencing symptoms. This is in order from them to can stay home and avoid spreading their illness that is a coronavirus disease or not, other than its long-term goal of supplying researchers with adequate data to create an algorithm for COVID-19 detection.

The smart rings will be used by both healthy people and those infected with COVID-19 to understand early warning signs that may precede symptoms.

According to their website, the Finland-based startup that has an office in San Francisco, lists its ring at about $300.

One of the strategies at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan was to have residents report their daily temperatures and isolate at the first sign of fever which the Oura ring could allow users to do the same.