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

David A. Drew; Long H. Nguyen; Claire J. Steves; Jonathan Wolf; Tim D. Spector; Andrew T. Chan

Mobile phone applications or web-based tools facilitate self-guided collection of population-level data at scale(15), the results of which can then be rapidly redeployed to inform participants of urgent health information (15, 16). Both are particularly advantageous when more than three-quarters of Americans are advised to physically distance(13). Such digital tools have 10 already been used in more controlled research settings which benefit from greater lead time for field testing, question curation, and recruitment. Although several digital collection tools for COVID-19 symptoms have been developed and launched in the U.S., including some in partnership with government health agencies such as the CDC, these applications have largely been configured to offer a single assessment of symptoms to tailor recommendations for further 15 evaluation. Alternatively, others have been developed for researchers to report patient-level information on behalf of participants already enrolled in clinical registries. While these approaches offer critical public health insights, they are not tailored for the type of scalable longitudinal data capture that epidemiologists need to perform comprehensive, well-powered investigations to address this public health crisis. 20 To meet this challenge, we established an international collaboration, the COronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) consortium, comprised of leading investigators from several large clinical and epidemiological cohort studies. COPE brings together a multidisciplinary team . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.