Whether you are perfectly healthy or think you may have contracted coronavirus, the free app allows you to report your symptoms to scientists in order to better track the spread of the disease

Available on the App Store and Google Play, COVID Symptom Tracker is an app created by nutrition app maker Zoe in collaboration with King's College London, Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, and the NHS in the UK The app will be available in the US on March 26, but anyone can use it in the UK right now

The app is very simple After setting up an account (the app emphasizes that your data is anonymized), you do an initial set-up, whether you are in some appropriate health condition, your zip code (zip code for US users), and whether you have someone who could theoretically take care of you if you were sick Explain

After this, the app's main feature, the symptom reporting questionnaire, begins The app urges you to report every day, even if you are not feeling well This is because the more data collected, the more information scientists will have about how the coronavirus pandemic is spreading, both in terms of geographic area and the type of people infected

This is not an app to use if you need health advice In fact, the app guides you to the NHS website This is purely to provide easy access to data for scientists to use

If you have concerns about how your data will be used, the app states that it will only be used for KCL, Guys and St Thomas' Hospitals, and potentially NHS researchers and not for commercial purposes

If you want to support the effort to fight the coronavirus pandemic with your own computer and not your own health information, check out Folding@home and join our sister site Tom's Hardware's folding team to help vaccinate against the virus Support research