Tap into our latest findings as we uncover them.
Many factors determine whether a person actually engages in appropriate protective behavior. In a recent journal article, we use survey data from 29,355 data donation participants to examine which characteristics alter behavior in the private domain, and how social environments affect behavior in the workplace. Here we summarise the most important results for you.
Dear donors,
For about half a year now, you have not only been able to donate your vitals and sleep data, but also to respond to various regular surveys about your personal experience and behaviour during the pandemic. For example, each week we ask how much our donors trust the federal government to properly handle the pandemic. The responses are measured on a five-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 5 (completely) and a total of 29,530 donors already submitted their responses. Since we recently received a request about this question according to the freedom of information (IFG) act we would like to share some information on that topic with you today.
In this blog post, we will give you further insight into the socio-demographic characteristics and the health situation of the data donors in the sub-study “Tests, Symptoms and Living Situation” (hereafter referred to as “sub-study”). This time we compare the educational level, the subjectively assessed health status and the utilization of general medical services of the participants in the sub-study with reference data. This brings us another step closer to the goal of describing data donors more precisely. Data donors in the sub-study are not representative of the general population, they registered themselves with the data donation app without having been randomly selected. This means that differences between the data donors and the general population are to be expected. We would like to further investigate in this blog post how strong these differences are with regard to the indicators mentioned.
In previous blogposts, we have already discussed the sociodemographics and spatial distribution of donors.
In this blogpost, we will again look at the sociodemographic composition and spatial distribution of donors. For the analysis, we will look at two selection levels each and compare them with the actual population composition (Census update, as of 12/31/2019). To do this, we look at sociodemographic and spatial distribution using three variables: spatial distribution at the state level (classified using the first three digits of the given zip code), gender, and age (recorded in categories of 10). In the first group, the data of the self-report at new registration of all data donors are analyzed, in the second group the data of the sub-study “tests, symptoms and living situation”. We would like to investigate two questions:
Note: Updated on April 11, 2022. See end of this text for details.
Datenspende 2.0 is finally here. Since mid-October you can answer short questionnaires in the app to help us to substantially improve our understanding of the donated vital data in relation to COVID-19. More than 12,000 people have already taken part and entrusted us with this information. For this we would like to express a heartfelt thank you right away.
This weekend it’s that time again: The clocks will be changed back one hour, from daylight saving time to standard time.
Since the beginning of the Corona Data Donation, this is the third clock change. Whether these changeovers are useful, unnecessary or even harmful is widely debated - both in terms of personal preference and public health. After all, numerous studies have shown that in the short term, the changeover can disturb one’s routines and well-being. In the long term, the changes influence when and how much sunlight we get in our daily lives. This can have a variety of effects on our bodies and psyche, in part mediated by changes in our sleep.
Dear donors, When this project started in April 2020, we did not expect hundreds of thousands of people to donate their health data for more than a year - your participation and continued willingness to support this project has exceeded our boldest dreams. To live up to the trust you’ve placed in us, we continue to adapt the project to best serve public health needs throughout the ongoing pandemic by exploring new use cases as they become relevant depending on the current situation. Right now, most of the team is busily working on a new version of the Datenspende app that will allow more direct interaction between the team and you.
Around a quarter of you donates not only their daily heart rate and steps but also their sleep data, particularly how long and when you sleep. Since sleep provides a wealth of information on health and well-being, we are now taking a closer look at these data - enlisting also the expertise of sleep researchers.
Dear donors, since the middle of December, we have seen a significant decrease in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Germany until the end of February. However, until now the Fever Monitor has continued to deviate from the case counts starting around the beginning of the new year. In this post, we will try to explain why we think this happened and introduce to you our updated algorithm.
The Corona Data Donation Project is designed to detect fever symptoms in the time-series of the donors’ daily resting heart rate and daily step count signals. See blog post “How does it work?” for the mechanics of how the whole thing works and the basic idea behind it, or check out some of the preliminary results we obtained in the past.
As of today, the Corona Data Donation Project features the Fever Monitor (see menu ‘Tools’ in the top navigation bar).
The monitor depicts the time course of the fever detections that we obtain from the raw resting heart rate and step count data the donors provide. Similar results were already discussed in the posts Feverish and Fever curves by federal state.
Remember the goal of the Data Donation Project? When we conceived and launched the project about three months ago we thought that we could use the daily donations of resting heart rate and daily step count to detect the onset of fever in donors which in turn would help us quantify changes in the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic because fever is a symptom of the infection. Details of the underlying scientific idea were discussed in the blog post How does it work?.
Many things have changed in the last few months; the number of active Covid-19 cases and local Corona-regulation, but also everyday things like the weather. Many of these things can influence the vital data of our donors; for example, lifted lockdowns, bank holidays and good weather may lead to more sport activity and could potentially lead to a high resting heart rate.
In addition to the daily average resting heart rate, we can obtain the daily step count from connected wearable fitness devices. Together with the resting heart rate, the step count is an important parameter for this study. As you can read in our post, The Pulse of the Nation, deviations from the average resting heart rate could indicate fever. However, resting heart rate may also deviate for various unrelated reasons.
Here we go: Our first intermediate result - The Regional Donor Map.
Prior to developing the anticipated fever map from aggregated heart rate information, we need to get a good understanding of the geographical distribution of our donors. Regional biases, for instance, need to be identified and considered in further analyses. Moreover, we must ensure that enough donors are registered in each district so that statistical evaluations are valid and the anonymization gained through the regional consolidation is guaranteed.
Dear Corona Data Donors!
We would like to express our sincere gratitude and appreciation to all of you.
Together, you have created a community of 538174 donors (as of 16.06.2021). On average, there are about 1304 donors per municipality in Germany, which is far more than we initially anticipated when the project was launched. Each and every one of you who registered for the Corona Data Donation is equipped with a fitness tracker or smart watch, directly enabling you to contribute data essential to understanding the COVID-19 situation in Germany. Moreover, your donation helps us improve our predictive models and develop a so-called Fever Map for Germany
At the beginning of April 2020, we launched the official Corona Data Donation App. Since then, over half a million people in Germany have decided to donate their data. For that, we would like to express our sincerest gratitude! There has never before been a research project of this magnitide involving the collaborative efforts of both citizens and scientists. It is really quite unique.
Some of you may be asking yourselves questions about the purpose of this project and the expected scientific results. What are we doing with your data donations and how will this help us better understand the current COVID-19 pandemic in Germany?
On this site, we would like to give you, the donor, a glimpse into the scientific process by sharing our findings as we uncover them. To achieve this transparency, we will regularly post updates detailing the methodological approaches and interim results of our analyses. We will do our best to clarify the motivation behind each stage in order to include everyone in this journey of scientific exploration as we work towards creating a Fever Map for Germany using vital signals collected by wearable health and fitness tracking devices and donated by you.
This goal of this map is to detect regions in which the number of residents exhibiting fever symptoms is higher than average. By updating the map on a daily and municipality-level basis, we aim to identify so-called “hot spots” of COVID-19 as they emerge. To learn more about how we intend to do this, please see our post How does it work?.