UCSF App Calls on ‘Citizen-Scientists’ to Better Understand COVID-19
A new initiative by UC San Francisco (UCSF) physician-scientists, called COVID-19 Citizen Science (CCS), will allow any adult in the world become a “citizen-scientist,” with the aim to better understand the COVID-19 outbreak.
UCSF researchers stated that the spread of coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has varied across individuals and regions, and the factors that determine how it affects individuals and populations are not well understood.
As such, a critical mass of CCS participants uploading information though the app, launched last week, could help researchers gain insight into how the virus is spreading and identify ways to predict and reduce the number of new infections, according to Gregory Marcus, M.D., professor in the Department of Medicine at UCSF and a co-leader of CCS.
The researchers’ hope, according to Marcus, is for the new study to “go viral,” but in a beneficial way, with a goal to ultimately enroll more than 1 million individuals around the world.
“We are asking each participant to share the link to recruit at least five others,” Marcus said. “We want to demonstrate that the number of people signing up for this scientific study and contributing their data can increase exponentially, faster than the disease itself.” With the goal of exponential growth, the researchers plan to create and share a data visualization that maps enrollment in CCS in real time, which Marcus hopes will show study participation outpacing the global spread of the virus.
Although public health studies can be challenging during a time of widespread social distancing, all that’s needed to join CCS is the link and a smartphone to download the mobile phone-based app. Once enrolled, participants will be asked to complete an initial 10- to 15-minute survey about their health and daily habits. Follow-up questions, delivered by push notification or text message on an ongoing basis, are expected to require five to 15 minutes per week.
Participants will be also given the option of providing nearly continuous geolocation (GPS) data, and soon, additional data from Fitbit or other Bluetooth-enabled biomonitoring devices, including blood pressure, weight, blood oxygen levels, body temperature, exercise and sleep.
In the long term, said Marcus, the collective participation of committed individuals in CCS will help identify behaviors, influences and factors that increase or decrease the risk of infection or that affect outcomes after infection. The greater the number of participants, the greater the likelihood of statistically valid findings emerging from the study.
Based around a smartphone app, information on the study can be accessed via https://eureka.app.link/covid19 (if prompted, enter the study key: covid) or by texting “COVID” to 41411.
CCS springs from a project called the Health eHeart Study that Marcus helped launch in 2013, which harnessed online and mobile advances to collect and analyze cardiovascular information from study participants. Health eHeart already has nearly 250
