Managing Energy Levels in Academia: Expanding the Conversation on Long COVID Pacing Technologies, 2026, Girouard

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https://hal.science/hal-05552565/document

Audrey Girouard, Raphaëlle N. Roy, Shanel Wu. Managing Energy Levels in Academia: Expanding the Conversation on Long COVIDPacingTechnologies. 19th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2026), Mar 2026, Marbella, Spain. ⟨hal-05552565⟩

Managing Energy Levels in Academia: Expanding the Conversation on Long COVIDPacing Technologies

Audrey Girouard1 a,Rapha¨ elle
N. Roy2 band
Shanel Wu1 c
1Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada
2F´ed´eration ENAC ISAE-SUPAERO ONERA, Universit´ede Toulouse, Toulouse, France {first author, third author}@carleton.ca, second author@isae-supaero.fr

Keywords:

Abstract: Long COVID, Pacing, Digital Tools, Energy Management.

This report shares the experiences of two researchers who live with Long COVID (LC). LC is a chronic condition where COVID-19 symptoms linger for over 3 months.

Like many other chronic illnesses and postinfectious syndromes, LC limits a person’s energy and managing the condition often focuses on “pacing”, i.e. regularly reducing activity levels to avoid post-exertion malaises.

Pacing is difficult to implement, and so is the general recognition and management of LC symptoms.

We report our experience with tools to help manage energy levels in an academic work context.

We reflect on the recent work on pacing technologies and contribute our perspectives to advance HCI’s understanding of Long COVID and other complex, fluctuating chronic illnesses.

As disabled scholars, we advocate for technology that supports pacing, an emerging topic in HCI and accessibility spaces.

 

[Hutan]

On the difficulty of knowing what PEM is:

Girouard: It took me over a year to recognize more clearly what a crash was. This means that at the be-ginning, I wasn’t reporting and recording my condi-tion correctly. I only considered crashes that I would now qualify as “enormous”, while it is important to also record smaller crashes (shorter in time and/or in intensity).

In truth, I was crashing almost daily, but because it was so frequent, I thought it was the norm with LC. Had I recognized them correctly earlier,I could have reduced my home activities and work periods to main to avoid crashing that frequently. This would have improved my quality of life earlier within my LC condition.

On baselines moving over time:

Girouard: My average day was worse two years ago compared to today, but I might still rate both expe-riences as “medium”, to leave room to indicate a very bad day as “high”, and a good day as “low”. This means that a “medium” from today isn’t equiv-alent to a “medium” from a few months or a year or two ago. My LC experience varies a lot through-out the day, even throughout an hour. This means that averaging my short-term experience to summa-rize the day is a difficult task in itself.

And on severity scales failing to capture real differences

Similarly, rating symptoms at their worst during the day may not reflect the entire day correctly. The experience I’ve had during a day where I felt miserable (i.e.,crashed) for an hour will be different than if I felt miserable for four hours. However, most scales en-countered do not capture that.

 

[Hutan]

On the 'adrenaline' type effect that enables the person to keep working, at the expense of a crash later:

Girouard:The timer is a critical tool for me so I don’t go over my limits without noticing. When I work, I get in the zone and I do not always notice my physical and cognitive fatigue levels. It’s similar to being on adrenaline when handling an emergency event: one can be fine during the situation in order to complete the task, and then crash afterwards. I need to use this external tracking tool so I can respect my pre-established limits (e.g. a work period of an hour maximum) and minimize crashes shortly after the end of work periods, or later on.

On the problem with using existing activity monitors that aim to get people more active:

Roy: The digital tool I use (activity tracker, stress tracker and cardiac activity tracker) comes with a Samsung smartwatch I started to use in March 2025. The problem is that these tools are designed to ask us to perform, while in my case, and for all LC pa-tients I think, it should be designed the other way: it should tell us to rest! For instance, if I am resting for an hour, the watch starts beeping, telling me “hey what about taking a walk?”. While what I want is: I’ve been working for 1.5 hour and the watch should tell me “hey how about resting a little?”. For the mo-ment, the only tool that might be able to do that, the Visible armband, is not available in my country.

On the use of remote access tools:

Software for virtual meetings (Zoom, Teams) enables us to interact and converse with colleagues when working from home, as well as maintain international collaborations, given that our chronic illness management prevents us from travel.

(I note that these two academics sound to have been senior academics when they became ill. Establishing a career while relying mainly on virtual meetings would be a lot harder than maintaining it.)

Roy:I have attended virtual workshops, confer-ences, meetings of national projects, defense juries, and PhD counseling meetings. The availability of this remote option that did not exist before lock-down is ironically increasing the accessibility of our line of work. But of course, the interactions are not the same

Asynchronous communication tools

asynchronous tools further reduced the energy demands of virtual work. Tools such as Slack, Discord, Teams, and emails enable us to respond when we have the energy to do so, instead of immediately and therefore constitute a great pac-ing tool.

The academics work in the field of accessibility for disabled people

As parting words, we challenge our col-leagues: don’t just do accessibility research projects, but also engage with institutional structures to im-prove accessibility in your community of practice.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I understand that it may take a considerable time for each person with ME/CFS to find the best way of planning their day to optimise what they can achieve and to avoid setbacks. What I query is whether digital technologies are actually any use for doing this. I also query the assumption that it has anythig to do with 'energy' or even 'activity' in the sense that a machine might measure it. A machine is not going to measure mental exertion. It is not going to measure the exertion of standing in a queue, which for a lot of people is surprisingly hard work.

And I worry that generalisig from one person's experience is necessarily helpful for others. What I hear here is that "PEM" is a very variable phenomenon. Crash means different things to different people.