Variability of temperature measurements recorded by a wearable device by biological sex.

Background: Females have been historically excluded from biomedical research due in part to the documented presumption that results with male subjects will generalize effectively to females. This has been justified in part by the assumption that ovarian rhythms will increase the overall variance of pooled random samples. But not all variance in samples is random.

Methods for detecting probable COVID-19 cases from large-scale survey data also reveal probable sex differences in symptom profiles.

Background: Daily symptom reporting collected via web-based symptom survey tools holds the potential to improve disease monitoring. Such screening tools might be able to not only discriminate between states of acute illness and non-illness, but also make use of additional demographic information so as to identify how illnesses may differ across groups, such as biological sex. These capabilities may play an important role in the context of future disease outbreaks.

Metrics from Wearable Devices as Candidate Predictors of Antibody Response Following Vaccination against COVID-19: Data from the Second TemPredict Study.

There is significant variability in neutralizing antibody responses (which correlate with immune protection) after COVID-19 vaccination, but only limited information is available about predictors of these responses. We investigated whether device-generated summaries of physiological metrics collected by a wearable device correlated with post-vaccination levels of antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD), the target of neutralizing antibodies generated by existing COVID-19 vaccines. One thousand, one hundred and seventy-nine participants wore an off-the-shelf wearable device (Oura Ring), reported dates of COVID-19 vaccinations, and completed testing for antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 RBD during the U.

Feasibility and acceptability of a Whole-Body hyperthermia (WBH) protocol.

Background: Whole-body hyperthermia (WBH) has shown promise as a non-pharmacologic treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD) in prior trials that used a medical (infrared) hyperthermia device. Further evaluation of WBH as a treatment for MDD has, however, been stymied by regulatory challenges.

Objective: We examined whether a commercially available infrared sauna device without FDA-imposed limitations could produce the degree of core body temperature (101.

Confirmation of interpersonal expectations is intrinsically rewarding.

People want to interact successfully with other individuals, and they invest significant efforts in attempting to do so. Decades of research have demonstrated that to simplify the dauntingly complex task of interpersonal communication, perceivers predict the responses of individuals in their environment using stereotypes and other sources of prior knowledge. Here, we show that these top-down expectations can also shape the subjective value of expectation-consistent and expectation-violating targets.

Feasibility of continuous fever monitoring using wearable devices.

Elevated core temperature constitutes an important biomarker for COVID-19 infection; however, no standards currently exist to monitor fever using wearable peripheral temperature sensors. Evidence that sensors could be used to develop fever monitoring capabilities would enable large-scale health-monitoring research and provide high-temporal resolution data on fever responses across heterogeneous populations. We launched the TemPredict study in March of 2020 to capture continuous physiological data, including peripheral temperature, from a commercially available wearable device during the novel coronavirus pandemic.