Apple Unveils CareKit Platform For Health Management
By Jof Enriquez,
Follow me on Twitter @jofenriq
Apple Inc. announced CareKit, a new open-source software platform that will let developers create health monitoring apps for users of Apple devices. It's similar to ResearchKit, a framework launched by Apple last year meant to provide user health data for research institutions to conduct large-scale studies.
CareKit apps running on iPhones and Apple Watches will allow individuals to monitor symptoms, medications, diet, exercise, and home care plans, and let them communicate with health care providers. Through these apps, people will able to empower themselves by taking more control of chronic conditions and their general well-being, according to Apple.
Due out in April, CareKit will allow developers to build upon four modules. According to Apple, these are:
- Care Card: Tracks medication or physical therapy; activities can be tracked using sensors in Apple Watch or iPhone
- Symptom and Measurement Tracker: Records symptoms and signs like body temperature; enables progress updates using simple surveys, photos that capture the progression of a wound, or activities calculated by using the iPhone’s accelerometer and gyroscope, such as quantifying range of motion
- Insight Dashboard: Used to correlate symptoms against the action items in the Care Card to monitor treatment outcomes
- Connect: Enables information-sharing and communicating with doctors, care teams, or family members about health changes
Apple said its partner health care institutions and companies have been using the modules in a variety of areas. The Texas Medical Center is using it to track patients' symptoms post-operatively, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is using an app to connect patients at home with remote care teams. There are other CareKit apps designed for monitoring diabetes, pregnancy, and depression.
Sage Bionetworks and the University of Rochester, meanwhile, are using CareKit to turn the mPower ResearchKit study into a valuable tool to help better inform patients about their conditions and care providers about treatment. At a recent Apple event, Apple COO Jeff Williams demonstrated the app, which helps patients with Parkinson's disease track the effectiveness of the drugs they're taking or the exercise regimens they're on, reports The Verge.
“With ResearchKit, we quickly realized the power of mobile apps for running inexpensive, high-quality clinical studies with unprecedented reach,” said Ray Dorsey, MD, David M. Levy Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in a statement. “We hope that CareKit will help us close the gap between our research findings and how we care for our Parkinson’s patients day-to-day. It’s opening up a whole new opportunity for the democratization of research and medicine.”
Similar to CareKit, ResearchKit was launched by Apple last year with the vision to catalyze medical research by collecting anonymized health data from iOS users. ResearchKit apps have been used to detect signs of Parkinson’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, breast cancer, autism, epilepsy, and melanoma. It's also been used to integrate genetic research and for sleep studies. ResearchKit also pulls data from Apple's related platform HealthKit, which facilitates data exchange between medical devices at home and electronic health records.
“We’re thrilled with the profound impact ResearchKit has already had on the pace and scale of conducting medical research, and have realized that many of the same principles could help with individual care,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, in a statement. “We believe that giving individuals the tools to understand what is happening with their health is incredibly powerful, and apps designed using CareKit make this a reality by empowering people to take a more active role in their care.”