We want to better understand COVID-19 and its long-term effects.

Corona-Datenspende: News & Analyses

With you, together.

<b>We want to better understand COVID-19 and its long-term effects.</b>

Our Reports

Tap into our latest findings as we uncover them.

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Two years of data donation: The Vital Data Explorer
Two years of data donation: The Vital Data Explorer

Dear Donors,

About a year ago, we were able to take stock of the first year of Datenspende. Today, around 470 million donated data points on heart rate, step count and sleep provide us with a unique insight into the development of vital signs under pandemic conditions.

Demographics of the donors in the 'Tests, symptoms and living situation' study
Demographics of the donors in the 'Tests, symptoms and living situation' study

Introduction

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:

Fighting the weather
Fighting the weather

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.

Feverish reloaded
Feverish reloaded

During the past few weeks we have been updating our Fever Monitor on a daily basis, based on the heart rate and activity data measured by the wearable devices and smart watches of more than 520.000 donors.

The Fever Monitor
The Fever Monitor

What is the fever monitor?

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.

Fever curves by federal state
Fever curves by federal state

In the last post Feverish we presented the first national “fever curve” based on and computed from the donors’ data. In this post, we not only want to give you an update on the national fever curve, but also want to show the results we obtained for the individual federal states in Germany.

How does it work?

By registring your wearable fitness device to the Corona Data Donation App, you are directly contributing to currently ongoing research. We are working to get a better understanding of the spread of the coronavirus in Germany.

Meet the team

This research project is an effort of the project group Computational Epidemiology lead by Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann. It is supported by the data protection team (lead by Claudia Enge) at the Robert Koch-Institute. The scientific analysis of the data is coordinated in collaboration with the Research on Complex Systems Group (ROCS) at the Institute for Theoretical Biology and IRI Life Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The technical infrastructure, particularly the technology used to collect and process the data, is provided by the e-health company Thryve.


Core team

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Annika Rose

PhD Student

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Adrian Zachariae

PhD Student

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Katharina Ledebur

PhD / Visiting Scientist

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Paul Buttkus

Master Student

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Robert W. Bruckmann

Master Student

Associates & Collaborations

Claudia Enge

Robert Koch Institute (DPO)

Lorenz Wascher

Robert Koch Institute

Johannes Lemcke

Robert Koch Institute

Daniel Grams

Robert Koch Institute

Ilter Öztürk

Robert Koch Institute

Ronny Kuhnert

Robert Koch Institute

Eva Winnebeck

Helmholtz Zentrum München

Cornelia Betsch

University of Erfurt

Philipp Sprengholz

University of Bamberg

Marie Luise Bohl

Robert Koch Institute

Christian Puta

Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Alumni

Paul Burggraf

COO Thryve

Hannes Schenk

Developer Thryve

Jakob Kolb

Alumnus

About the project

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?.