CPS-3 Participants Invited to Use COVID-19 Symptom Tracker
The American Cancer Society invited CPS-3 participants to use a new app, the COVID Symptom Tracker, to help ACS investigators track the COVID-19 epidemic and inform future research efforts.
The app was created by doctors and scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Massachusetts General Hospital, King's College London, and Stanford University School of Medicine, working in partnership with the health science company ZOE. It is available to anyone in the United States or United Kingdom.
Once the Covid-19 Symptom Tracker is downloaded, this icon appears on the desktop.
Participants simply download the app and each day, track whether they are feeling any symptoms.
The app's goal is to help us better understand and identify:
- The symptoms of COVID-19
- How fast the virus is spreading in different areas
- High-risk areas in the country
- Who is most at risk by better understanding symptoms linked to health conditions
- The exposure of healthcare workers to COVID-19
“By inviting CPS-3 participants to use this app, we hope to be able to help address the immediate and long-term needs of cancer patients and survivors,” said Alpa Patel, PhD, senior scientific director, epidemiology research and lead investigator for CPS-3. “In the short term, data gathered from the app will help characterize the progression of symptoms and trajectories related to coronavirus. Over time, the data can be combined with CPS-3 data to study the longer-term health effects related to infection, including in vulnerable populations like cancer survivors.”
Other major studies have also asked participants to use the tracker, including the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest and longest-running scientific studies in the world with 280,000 participants, many of whom are active healthcare workers treating people with COVID.