Tomas Chlebek At today's keynote, Apple devoted significant attention to its initiatives in the healthcare sector, where the company, thanks to the Watch, is increasingly speaking. Apple COO Jeff Williams summarized the results of the first year of ResearchKit applications and introduced the new CareKit platform. With its help, they will be able to create applications that will allow users to clearly and efficiently monitor the progress of their own treatment.
A year ago, Apple announced ResearchKit, a platform enabling the creation of applications for medical research. Currently, applications created with the help of ResearchKit are available in the USA, Great Britain and Hong Kong, and have already had a great impact on the research of several diseases.
For example, thanks to the Asthma Health app created Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai asthma triggers have been discovered in all fifty US states. Researchers have access to data from people from many different backgrounds with a wide range of genetic heritage, allowing them to gain a much broader view of the causes, course and possible treatments of the disease.
Thanks to another diabetes research app, GlucoSuccess developed by the hospital The Massachusetts General Hospital, the different ways in which people with type 2 diabetes respond to treatment have been better explored. This supported the theory that there are subtypes of type 2 diabetes and, in Williams' words, "paved the way for future more precise treatments."
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The ResearchKit video also mentioned applications to help with the early diagnosis of autism, follow the course of Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy research by collecting data from seizure patterns using the Apple Watch to create seizure prediction tools. When describing the importance of ResearchKit for medicine, it was often mentioned that the applications created in it have the potential to help not only in research, but also directly to people in monitoring their health status or the course of illness and treatment. Apple decided to take this idea further and created CareKit.
CareKit is a platform that will make it possible to create applications for regular and effective monitoring of the health condition of users. The first application, Parkinson's Disease, was presented, which aims to make the individual treatment of patients with Parkinson's disease significantly more efficient.
In describing the CareKit, Williams talked about how much of an impact the period after surgery has on the outcome, when the patient is no longer monitored by high-tech hospital equipment, but only has to follow the instructions on the paper he received before leaving the hospital.
Understandably, these guidelines are often followed irregularly, or not at all. Apple therefore uses CareKit in cooperation with Texas Medical Center created an application that provides the patient with a clear overview of what to do during the recovery process, what medications to take and how often, how and when to exercise, etc. The patient also continuously enters information about their health into the application, which they can share with loved ones, but especially with your attending physician, who can adjust the treatment parameters if necessary.
CareKit, like ResearchKit, will be open source and available in April.
It's a shame that Europe will be out again. ?