Version Reporting and Assessment Approaches for New and Updated Activity and Heart Rate Monitors.

This paper addresses the significant need for improvements in device version reporting and practice across the academic and technical activity monitoring literature, and it recommends assessments for new and updated consumer sensing devices. Reproducibility and data veracity are central to good scholarship, and particularly significant in clinical and health applications. Across the literature there is an absence of device version reporting and a failure to recognize that device validity is not maintained when firmware and software updates can, and do, change device performance and parameter estimation. In this paper, we propose the use of tractable methods to assess devices at their current version and provide an example empirical approach. Experimental results for heart rate and step count acquisitions during walking and everyday living activities from Garmin Vivosmart 3 (v4.10) wristband monitors are presented and analyzed, and the reliability issues of optically-acquired heart rates, especially during periods of activity, are demonstrated and discussed. In conclusion, the paper recommends the empirical assessment of new and updated activity monitors and improvements in device version reporting across the academic and technical literature

SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity are associated with genetic variants affecting gene expression in a variety of tissues

Variability in SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and COVID-19 disease severity between individuals is partly due to genetic factors. Here, we identify 4 genomic loci with suggestive associations for SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility and 19 for COVID-19 disease severity. Four of these 23 loci likely have an ethnicity-specific component. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) signals in 11 loci colocalize with expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) associated with the expression of 20 genes in 62 tissues/cell types (range: 1:43 tissues/gene), including lung, brain, heart, muscle, and skin as well as the digestive system and immune system. We perform genetic fine mapping to compute 99% credible SNP sets, which identify 10 GWAS loci that have eight or fewer SNPs in the credible set, including three loci with one single likely causal SNP. Our study suggests that the diverse symptoms and disease severity of COVID-19 observed between individuals is associated with variants across the genome, affecting gene expression levels in a wide variety of tissue types

A first update on mapping the human genetic architecture of COVID-19

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