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| Apple's CareKit--Courtesy of Apple |
Apple ($AAPL) announced the impending launch of CareKit, saying the new offering will build on ResearchKit by helping patients electronically manage their health by keeping track of symptoms and medication usage.
The open source initiative will debut next month. It will consist of four modules that developers can expand upon. They are:
- Care Card to track medication adherence, or activities like physical therapy exercise, with the help of the Apple Watch or iPhone
- Symptom and Measurement Tracker to compile records, including in the form of surveys, photos or calculations made by the iPhone's accelerometer and gyroscope, such as range of motion
- Insight Dashboard to provide information on whether treatments are working
- And lastly, Connect for information sharing with doctors or family members
"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 Apple COO Jeff Williams 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."
The Silicon Valley bigwig named several stakeholders who are planning to deploy CareKit into their apps for Parkinson's patients, post-surgery progress, home health monitoring, diabetes management, mental health and maternal health.
"With ResearchKit, we quickly realized the power of mobile apps for running inexpensive, high-quality clinical studies with unprecedented reach," said Dr. Ray Dorsey, 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."
- read the release