Garmin: Suggest feature to detect Covid-19

pxl said:

having a 60 pulse OX

if you've got 60% pulse ox, you won't care. You'll be dead.

FWIW I was recently in the ER (not CV19, had a disagreement with a table saw) and saw my Fenix consistently over the hours I was there reading roughly 6 points lower than the hospital ox sensor.   I've always assumed it read low though. 

Interestingly I could switch from 95% to 99% on the hospital monitor by taking excessively deep breaths for about 20-30 seconds. Then watch it drop as I went back to breathing normally. 

I would love body temperature but this thing can't read the temperature from a website.  I did a run today and it tagged the temperature at 74 to 83 degrees when it was only mid 50's.  I guess the app wasn't open?

So with body temperature, you might wake up with a temperature of 114 degrees, run to the hospital, and people would be here defending the accuracy with "gosh, you know you gotta get a external temperature sensor".

I don't complain about Pulse Ox, but when I first got it, it was kind of a random number generator.  It's pretty good now, in the mid 90's, although like the OP said, it's probably 3 or 4 percent low.  To be fair, just measured it at 99%, so I guess now low at the moment.

Protocols in diagnosis using body properties (HR, respiration, body temp, etc) are way older than any electronic device would exist at all. It's not that you need approved devices with high accuracy to make a diagnosis. 

Having all these, of course, will lead to less misdiagnosis and improve the speed and makes the measurement comparable to each other - no wonder these have to be approved in medical practice.

Here we wouldn't need that, and without experience we would not utilize an approved device with high accuracy - or (being outsiders) we'd simply misinterpret the data.

But measuring and checking your own data in long term (and comparing to your health status) could help you to learn your body responses, and detect something unusual to go to doc in time - something otherwise you'd ignore.

I like to say that a scale that's off by 5 pounds isn't a big deal as long as it's off the same way every time.  The doctor I go to has me 10 pounds heavier than I am, which leads to an inevitable lecture with me thinking "you know, I'm in clothes, with keys, wallet, phone, shoes, jacket, and your scale is probably off (checked mine) and you are lecturing me about fitness, a guy who runs up and down hills, jeez, you fat......"

Sorry, that didn't make my point. :)

Anyways, I agree with you about the long-term effects.  Doctors always get bent about us self-diagnosing but a lot of what they do is basic checks and blood work.  I get the results of blood work, if it's all green, I don't need to see them again but they always want you to come in for that.  Even if it's not green, the data I get from Quest, which winds up in Apple Health (praise your favorite diety) tells me what the test means, and, if I had a history that followed me I could explain to them that it's always been like this so we didn't go down the same rabbit hole again, unless it wasn't, like my thyroid numbers.

Blood pressure and the white coats is a pernicious problem for me.  I've been 140/90 in the doctor's office since I was 20.  At home it used to be 112/75.  Now it's 119/80, so higher, but not a cause for alarm, but I get the damn speech every time.

Oh, one more trivia point, the average human temperature has dropped.  They aren't sure why, however, it may be better testing methods, or, something really did change.

I hope fenix 6 ASIA Sapphire  can also measure Pulse OX...

Some people are skeptical however, Garmin has a lot of advantage over ad-hoc checks at hospitals/surgeries...

It's got patient history and baseline taken on the same device in the variety of conditions and at home in one's bed at conditions that are reproduced most of the nights. Even if the particular metric is bit off then Garmin will show useful trends.

Also Garmin has access to data from loads of this devices, so in theory it could detect hot spots and outbreaks.

Nonetheless on individual level it could detect pretty easily more severe cases - useful if patient has not made it already to hospital.

I used APK - cardiogram for 3 months. I received an update today, and now I can check my sleeping HR. I think this apk is very helpfull to compare and control our data.

Withings are saying that new watch could help to detect covid. But include ecg. So seems possible

8256881 said:

that new watch could help to detect covid.

Your watch can't detect any virus, let alone COVID-19.  All it can do is show a change in certain metrics, which may be a result of too many things to list here that are unrelated to COVID-19.  For example, I had a long weekend in Las Vegas months before COVID-19 was detected.  I checked all the boxes with my metrics and I can assure you I wasn't patient zero.