The pandemic concerns us all. Much of the world's population is currently confined to their homes, which often leads to a growing sense of helplessness. This is all the more true as there are no means of regaining a degree of control and information over the current crisis. Two CRI projects aim to support people in their personal learning around COVID-19 and have just received funding from the European Commission.’OpenCovid19 initiative from Just One Giant Lab.
Find out more about these projects below:
Quantified Flu
Quantified Flu is a collaborative community science project that combines symptom self-monitoring and wearable data to explore the potential individual value of this data. It was launched by CRI Fellow Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and colleagues. The community itself has hypothesized that wearable devices might be able to predict when we fall ill, even before we are aware of the symptoms. This is because physiological data from wearable devices may contain certain indicators of illness (for example, resting heart rate may rise).
But beyond this, there is a broader assumption that we can collectively learn a great deal about how our physiological signals respond to infections and the symptoms we manifest when we have an infection. This value may exist especially in the contextualization of this data with self-tracking of symptoms, with the data of others and with one's own previous data.
Visitquantified influenza n’ is not an attempt at epidemiology. Rather than seeing it as a crisis intervention, we see it as related to the crisis in a different way: people are increasingly aware of and interested in whether they are getting sick (and whether that sickness is COVID-19). If people are already interested in this self-monitoring, the project aims to make it more rewarding, more valuable, and to do it together.
The micro-subsidy OpenCovid19 will Quantified Flu to rapidly extend its support to other portable devices.
How to contribute
If you would like to participate in the collection of your own symptoms, or if you would like to see data from your wearable devices in the context of symptoms, please register at Quantified Flu! If you'd like to volunteer beyond that and contribute to data analysis and more, get in touch with the community by joining the OpenCovid19 Slack and visit us on the canal #proj-quantifiedflu !
Global webinars for students
Millions of high school and university students around the world are currently forced to stay at home and rely on online tools for their education. With global webinars for students, The aim is to enable students not only to understand the current COVID-19 epidemic, but also to gain a broader understanding of biology, scientific research, epidemiology, drug discovery, vaccine development and all the challenges and limits of our current knowledge. The project was launched by CRI teacher Eugenia Covernton, in collaboration with CRI researcher Liubov Tupikina and the “Lecturers without borders” team.”Speakers without borders“(LeWiBo) to encourage critical thinking and enable them to actively participate in educating others, showing them how they themselves can help reduce these social problems.
The project is developing a series of webinars in English, Spanish and French, which will be offered free of charge to schools and universities. They will be recorded and made available as online conferences. Students will be invited by their institutions, and the LeWiBo team will coordinate all activities, adapting the content to the specific requirements of each institution and the students' prior knowledge. Webinars will be interactive, and students will be able to send in questions in advance to actively participate in defining the content of each session.
How to contribute
You can find the team on the #proj-free-edu-webinars-virus channel of the’OpenCovid19 slack. You can find LeWiBo on social media (Facebook, Twitter), and join the JOGL from Lecturers without borders JOGL Community.
If you would like to request a webinar for your institution, please use this form.
If you wish to participate as a speaker, please use this form.
