Skip to main content

Your Fitbit may be able to detect a key coronavirus symptom

Your Fitbit could help detect if you have symptoms of the coronavirus.

Earlier this year, Fitbit rolled out blood oxygen monitoring to five of its devices. That feature takes on new significance as the coronavirus spreads, as some COVID-19 patients have extremely low blood-oxygen levels.

Right now, the blood oxygen monitoring is part of Fitbit’s sleep tracking, so it doesn’t seem to take measurements while you’re awake. It is also not giving exact percentages of your blood-oxygen levels. Instead, a graph shows you the points during the night where there are big and small variations in oxygen saturation levels.

While these stats were originally intended to help people track potential issues, like sleep apnea, One Zero points out that if Fitbit makes the readings available during the day, it could alert those with COVID-19 to changes in oxygen levels, which they might not otherwise notice.

Pulse oximeters are medical devices that measure the amount of oxygenated blood in your body. Doctors become concerned if the level drops below 93%, according to Science Magazine.

Hypoxia — or low blood-oxygen levels — can rapidly lead to pneumonia in some patients, one doctor wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.

The Fitbit’s monitor doesn’t yet have approval from the Food and Drug Administration as a medical device. The company notes the devices are “not intended for medical purposes.”

Apple may also be planning to include a blood-oxygen level monitoring feature in its upcoming watch, expected to be called Apple Watch 6, according to 9to5Mac. It will likely be similar to the way the heart monitoring alert works. If the watch detects serious changes, it would urge the wearer to consult a doctor.

Editors' Recommendations

Jenny McGrath
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…
We finally know the price of Asus’ most powerful gaming NUC
The Asus ROG NUC on a desk surrounded by three monitors.

The first Asus ROG NUC (Next Unit of Computing) model is just around the corner. The small form factor PC is now up for pre-order at a German retailer, and although it's powerful enough to rival some of the best laptops, it costs more than many comparable models -- and you'll still have to pay extra for a monitor.

Asus' first take on Intel's portable PC contains a lot of compute power in a small chassis. Although there are a few configurations of the PC, the one that was spotted up for sale ahead of time comes with Intel's latest Meteor Lake-H CPU, the Core Ultra 9 185H, which sports 16 cores and 22 threads and can be boosted to run at up to 5.1GHz, all with a thermal design power (TDP) of 45 watts. However, Asus allows overclocking, meaning that the CPU can run at up to 65 watts instead.

Read more
YouTube tells creators to start labeling ‘realistic’ AI content
YouTube on Roku.

YouTube is taking steps to try to help viewers better understand if what they’re watching has been created, whether completely or in part, by generative AI.

“Generative AI is transforming the ways creators express themselves -- from storyboarding ideas to experimenting with tools that enhance the creative process,” YouTube said in a message shared on Monday. “But viewers increasingly want more transparency about whether the content they’re seeing is altered or synthetic.”

Read more
AMD is making the CPU more and more obsolete in gaming
A demo of AMD GPU work graphs featuring in-game scenery including a castle and a town.

At GDC 2024, AMD just expanded on Microsoft's recently announced Work Graphs API, and a quick demo shows just how powerful the new tech can be for gaming performance. AMD's iteration moves draw calls and mesh nodes from the CPU to the GPU, cutting back on the time it takes to execute these tasks. As a result, AMD found that there was a massive performance improvement -- rendering time saw a 64% boost -- when using Work Graphs with mesh shaders.

Microsoft introduced Work Graphs as a way to streamline processes both in gaming and in productivity, all by giving the GPU the power to schedule and execute tasks without first communicating with the CPU. It's built into the Direct3D 12 API and it can reduce bottlenecks and improve gaming performance in 3D games.

Read more