Why scientists need you to complete your ZOE Health Profile

March 1, 2022

This article has not been updated recently

The new ZOE Health Profile

When we launched the ZOE COVID Study back in March 2020, it was with the sole aim to fight COVID-19. Everyone who joined was asked basic questions about their health to understand how respiratory diseases like COVID affect different people.

Now, we’re moving beyond COVID to launch Wider Health Studies with the help of over 800,000 Contributors who signed up. 

The Health Profile is designed to give ZOE a robust view of every Contributor’s health, so we can understand and adjust for factors that alter your risk of catching disease.

To date, the information we collect from new Contributors has been limited to basic things like age, location, a few health conditions and current occupation. For many contributors some of this information is now two years out of date. 

Our new health questionnaire includes information like current health conditions, family history of illness and lifestyle. This is now available in the app, and in the future we aim to offer you the option to update your information as things like medications or weight change.

The questions will fill in the gaps and become the foundation of your ZOE Health Profile to ultimately help our scientists understand you, so that we can offer the insights that matter most to you.

Kept up to date, your ZOE Health Profile will become a comprehensive record of your health which can show how your symptoms and your health change over time. Each contribution forms part of an even larger data set consisting of thousands of contributors to help spot patterns and reveal what your day-to-day symptoms can tell us about immune health. 

In the future, this will also be incredibly helpful for medical appointments, as we’ve had lots of Contributors asking us for a profile that they can use to share with their doctors as a record of how they’ve been feeling, something which doctors too would find helpful. This detailed symptom history is something quite unique to the ZOE app that you can’t find anywhere else, so we’ll let you know when this part of the profile goes live as it’s not yet available.

How to use the Health Profile?

We want you to fill out a detailed questionnaire on your personal health - both current and historical. Look out for the Health Profile Questionnaire that will launch automatically from the app when you next log on. You can see the progress of your questionnaire if you don't complete it all in one go, and can click on the link in the home screen to finish up form where you last left off.

We’ll be asking you questions ranging from your general health history to specific diseases or conditions you may be suffering from, including any allergies and intolerances. Whatever health information you’re happy to share with us, there will be an option to do so in your Health Profile.

We guarantee that we will protect your data and only use it for the research purposes that we’ve already set out. By providing us with this information ZOE can continue to change human health research and offer unparalleled insights into immune health.

Why do we need updated health information? 

Our scientists are working on analysing all of the data entered in the app every day to come up with interesting and useful insights. But this is currently limited to the symptoms, vaccines, and COVID tests reported every day, specific questionnaires, and the basic information you’ve already shared with us.

By sharing more detailed information about your medical history, and personal health profile, we’re able to provide insights that take account of what makes us unique, and also to make our data more accurate with the analysis and reports offered by our team of scientists.

We’ll be able to use insights from your health profile to help to answer important scientific questions, investigate chronic conditions and illnesses like dementia and heart disease, and to use as a baseline for future health research.

Your data will provide a model for important longitudinal studies to be used to many future studies to come.You’re under no obligation to answer anything you’d prefer not to, but the more details you can provide, the more accurate and relevant we can make our insights both to you and for our scientific papers. 

What’s in it for you?

In the future, we hope to offer you tailored insights into both your own personal health, as well as scientific research to help you achieve health goals to improve both your short and long term health outcomes. This would include helping to manage disease risk across a whole manner of illnesses including COVID-19 and chronic diseases.

What’s next for the ZOE Health Study? 

Adding all of this information and widening your reporting on daily symptoms and health conditions doesn’t mean that we’ll stop reporting on COVID. However, we hope that the pandemic won’t be around forever and we want to be in a position to continue research into other health conditions with our amazing community of citizen scientists logging every day.

In the future, we hope that you’ll be able to use your app health profile to share your information with your medical professional, to empower them to support your unique needs. It will also be a handy tool for you to keep track of your medications, and how these may affect you.

Look out for updates and changes to the app in the near future to help continue on this mission to fight wider health with the ZOE COVID Study. 

Stay safe and keep logging!


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