It will not be very far from now that we will wear wristband or wrist watch that will warn us about a flu, well before it becomes contagious or showing explicit symptoms.
It could be a great news, especially when we face pandemics like Covid-19 which does not show symptoms in the early stage thus leading to silent spreading of the virus.
A study, still in its pre-print stage, showed that medical wristband could suggest evidence of disrupted sleep could predict when study participants were coming down with the flu—24 hours before they became contagious.
A machine learning algorithm used data from a medical wristband to deduce the sleep patterns of 25 study participants who had been deliberately exposed to a strain of the flu. For seven of the eight participants who came down with the flu and also had usable data, evidence of disrupted sleep appeared 24 hours before the participants began shedding viruses.
“As we get more data from the populations wearing smart watches through this pandemic, our predictive models will be refined. We imagine that these refined models could be used to generate an early warning signal and even potentially enable the prediction of asymptomatic spreading without tests,” said corresponding author Alfred Hero, the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering.
