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1/n: As COVID (hopefully) begins to wind down, it's time for mobile health researchers (myself included) to address our failure to usefully respond to the global pandemic.
2/n: In some respects, this should have been easy. In March and April of last year there was no shortage of interest from big tech and government alike to implement Ubicomp-esque technologies.
3/n: There were dozens of news stories about how smartphones could be repurposed as pulse-oximeters, or how Google+Apple's contact tracing API would make exposure alerts as simple as push notifications.
4/n: If there was ever a time for our field to prove that all those years of wrangling GPS data and nagging labmates to pilot our most recent app were worth the investment, it was then.
5/n: And what came of it all? Not much. Sure, in some countries like Singapore contact tracing saw widespread adoption, but only via government mandate (raising all kinds of privacy + ethics questions that deserve a thread of their own)
6/n Ultimately, it won't be clever "hacky" press-friendly technologies that dig us out of this mess. It'll be good old fashioned vaccines supercharged by a generation of investment in computational biology, genetics, and logistics
7/n All that being said, I don't mean to imply that mHealth was useless over the last year. Certainly technologies from our field lessened the blow and saved some unquantifiable number of lives.
8/n Apple and Google's decisions to open source aggregated mobility data probably provided a valuable datapoint in the confusing early days of the pandemic (although someone could write a paper analyzing this claim)
9/n The work on mobility data led by @serinachang5 did a fantastic job of borrowing "old" methods from epidemiology and mHealth to find actionable results that local governments could actually use to make policy
10/n But for the most part? Crickets.
11/n Please understand that I write this as an active mHealth researcher and a believer in the field's long term potential to address problems of health inequality, access, management, and diagnosis. But I have two recommendations:
12/n Rec1: Make tools that people want to use! Just because your n=30 study of a college population had good compliance doesn't mean a sufficiently large and diverse population (like a whole country) will.
13/m Rec2: Do studies that drive policy! Trust the civic process! I think our field underestimates how impactful a single recommendation to the public health commissioner of a mid-sized city could be.
