tmwi, a leading innovator in data and marketing whose clients include Nestle, MG and Furniture Village, have signed up as lead sponsors of a study to further research and understand the spread of COVID-19. 

The sponsorship comes as tmwi looks to add its support to an initiative that increases the country’s chances of getting back up and running as soon as possible.

The project, by the University of St Andrews and data scientists Blue Hat Associates, aims to gather key information from full households’ reports of COVID-19 and link these with medical records to get a better idea of the true number of people with the disease.

It is one of three research projects awarded to St Andrews as part of the Scottish Government’s COVID-19 Rapid Research programme.

Chris Phillips, CEO of tmwi, said the company’s sponsorship of the research was in response to the hugely negative impact he is seeing first hand with many of their clients who have been impacted to varying degrees by the pandemic.

He said: “We feel passionate about supporting anything that we believe will get the economy moving and bring an end to lockdown. We believe this study shows some very real promise in terms of learning more about how the virus spreads which will, in turn, enable the country to resume something resembling normality before very long.”

The project will look to see if people who stay at home with COVID-19 have different symptoms to those who need medical help or are admitted to hospital.

Crucially, it will shed light on the health of children and the elderly who have typically been overlooked in the existing Government-endorsed app which only gathers information from individuals - typically tech-savvy adults.

Using crowd-sourced data collected via the c19track.org website, researchers will gain a better understanding of the profile of the pandemic within households and within communities.