CSH Talk by Katharina Ledebur & Marc Wiedermann

Wearable-derived data, including heart rate, activity, and sleep timing, has unlocked novel opportunities to monitor human health and behavior at large-scale and high resolution.  One such data set was collected from over 120,000 German residents using a dedicated smartphone app that connected to their fitness trackers and smartwatches. Additionally, users engaged in regular surveys on self-assessed health, enabling an advanced understanding of how objective physiological measurements translate into everyday experiences. 

After briefly recapping the applicability of such data for infectious disease surveillance, we highlight our recent advances in understanding the interplay between behavior, physiology, and subjective well-being. We first show distinctive characteristics in a small sample of individuals who likely suffer from Long COVID-19. On average, these users consistently report lower levels of well-being and show patterns of reduced fitness compared to population averages, even before developing the condition. From there, we broaden our scope to provide fine-grained insights on the general association between health behavior and quality of life from a larger population-wide sample, demonstrating a distinct positive interrelation between a healthy lifestyle and well-being.