# Rapid implementation of mobile technology for real-time epidemiology of COVID-19

## TL;DR

A mobile app was developed to collect real-time data on COVID-19 symptoms and spread, helping track the pandemic more effectively.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a rapidly deployed mobile app for real-time epidemiology of COVID-19, enabling large-scale data collection.

## Key findings

- The COPE consortium's mobile app gathered data from over 2.25 million users in the UK and US.
- The app provided insights into risk factors, symptoms, clinical outcomes, and geographical hotspots of COVID-19.
- The initiative demonstrated the feasibility of using mobile technology for scalable epidemiological data collection.

## Abstract

The rapid pace of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic (COVID-19) presents challenges to the robust collection of population-scale data to address this global health crisis. We established the COronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) consortium to bring together scientists with expertise in big data research and epidemiology to develop a COVID-19 Symptom Tracker mobile application that we launched in the UK on March 24, 2020 and the US on March 29, 2020 garnering more than 2.25 million users to date. This mobile application offers data on risk factors, herald symptoms, clinical outcomes, and geographical hot spots. This initiative offers critical proof-of-concept for the repurposing of existing approaches to enable rapidly scalable epidemiologic data collection and analysis which is critical for a data-driven response to this public health challenge.

COVID-19 symptom tracker for smartphones