COVID Collab was created at King’s College London by a team of software developers lead by Dr Amos Folarin and data scientists lead by Professor Richard Dobson who founded the open source RADAR-base platform. Our group based within the Precision Health Informatics Lab PHIDL at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience in King’s College London have been involved in several large scale remote data collection projects using wearable, IoT and smartphone sensors. Leveraging our experience with mobile health and remote monitoring research with RADAR-base, we developed the Mass Science app to help us collect wearable data and study the CoViD-19 disease and pandemic, this work is non-commercial and is entirely developed at King’s College London.
Currently we are working using Fitbit data because this is a popular device where the data is readily accessible, but we have experience with other devices and aim to introduce a wider range of devices in follow-up versions of the app (you may email us covid-collab@kcl.ac.uk if you are interested in being notified of new wearable devices included in the study).
Definitely! We’d be greatly appreciative of this retrospective data. If you are able to provide the time-point when you are experiencing symptoms or received a diagnosis then we are able to use this as context.
Yes, while our immediate focus is on participants in the UK, this is a worldwide pandemic and we want to study a wide range of people at different stages of the pandemic.
No. You will not receive medical advice from this study, it is purely a research study. Please seek medical advice from appropriate national health bodies, governments, or your doctor.
No, you can not participate if you are younger than 18. The current ethics approval for the study is restricted to adults over the age of 18.
Yes. The Mass Science app will send you a notification to indicate when a questionnaire is available to complete. The PHQ8 and GAD7 questionnaires, which look for symptoms of depression and anxiety, are available to complete every two weeks. You can inform us of Covid-19 symptoms or a diagnoses at any point.
Yes. When enrolling in the study there is an option to consent for us to be able to contact you. If you accept, we will contact you with information about sub-studies that you are eligible for. You are free to join or not join the sub-studies with no impact on your participation of the main study.
These are similar studies also collection data from wearable devices. We are in communication with these national projects and are harmonising data collection with the view to being able to work together on answering common scientific questions.
We are working on generating a visualisation of your own data within the app. In the future we will also provide summary data on this website, and publishing open access papers. Further information about this will be disseminated on this portal in due course.
We will collect data for a year following enrolment, but your are free to pause or stop that collection at any time.
All the data you provide will be stored on a secure and encrypted server. Your personal information, for example name, email address, or age, will be stored seperately to other data provided by you (e.g. questionnaire responses) and will only be available to comply with data requests or to contact you regarding other studies if you explicitly consent to be contacted. More information can be found in our privacy policy.
Yes, COVID Collab is a completely non-profit study undertaken by researchers at King’s College London and the NIHR Maudsley BRC. If you take part, your data will only be used for research purposes.
You may stop data collection yourself at any time by logging out and uninstalling the app. At that point we will no longer collect your data. You may also rejoin at any point by installing the app and logging back in. You may also opt out of specific types of data, for example by switching off location collection in the app or by not connecting your Fitbit account.
You may withdraw from the study within the app by selected the “Leave Study” option from the drop down main menu. You may also uninstall the app and then send us an email from the email account you registered with to covid-collab@kcl.ac.uk with the subject “COVID Collab Study: Withdraw”) You may optionally request that any personal information or data tied to your identity is deleted
We can only remove data that is tied to your identity, for example personal details or location. Data which you contributed but has been subsequently anonymised or aggregated will not be possible to delete because it will no longer be tied to your identity.
We need your email address for two reasons: so that we can verify who you are if you lose your password and so that you can withdraw from the study without using the app by proving your identity with your email address.
If you find a bug or would like to raise an issue about thte study please email us at masssci@kcl.ac.uk with the subject “COVID Collab issue/bug”