A few days ago I told you about one of the most ambitious development kits in the Big Apple: CareKit. The center of action of this kit is follow-up of patients through applications focused on different pathologies. Apple provides developers with the means to create apps to guide the patient through a multidisciplinary team of engineers, medical staff, and developers. The ultimate goal of CareKit is to follow the diagnosis, help adhere to treatment guidelines, and collaborate through ResearchKit, the kit I'm going to talk about today, based on the introduction of medical research.
Medical Research Engages in iOS Using ResearchKit
ResearchKit is an open source development kit created by Apple whose mission is to enable researchers and developers to create powerful apps for medical research. This system is helping both healthcare teams and patients themselves to develop conclusive results to develop studies that improve and promote the evolution of the pathologies studied.
The apps created with ResearchKit have already led to numerous studies and conclusions at an unprecedented rate and scale. This success has led us to go one step further with CareKit, an app development platform that allows users to monitor their health on a daily basis.
One of the keys to this kit consists of data collection which means that thousands of people with similar pathologies record their symptoms, their clinical data, how they feel ... all the stored data are filtered and screened by multidisciplinary teams, capable of seeing the results in real time in order to improve studies and arrive at solutions. Although the research work is not easy, this mass information is useful to continue advancing.
And since ResearchKit works seamlessly with HealthKit, researchers can access data even more relevant to their studies - such as daily step counts, calorie use, and heart rate.
An example would be the autism, a psychological disorder characterized by the intense concentration of the person in his own inner world that is usually diagnosed at 5 years. With the advances of the teams that are working on this disorder and ResearchKit, they have achieved create an application that allows you to detect autism at 20 months. How? By exposing different videos on the screen of a device and recording the reactions of a possible individual with this pathology. These data, and the presence of an involved team behind it, are helping thousands of people to be diagnosed early and make the patient's evolution much faster.
There are many applications that are available in the App Store that are compatible with ResearchKit, for example Asthma Health, an app for asthmatics that accesses the device's GPS and advises these patients of which places they do not have to visit due to air quality, in addition to storing data in order to achieve a personalized treatment for each person. These data may be sent by CareKit to a doctor or to the people we deem necessary. It should be noted that a large part of these apps are only in the American App Store because ResearchKit has not reached that deeply to Spanish developers.
A big step for medical research taken by Apple
What is clear is that Apple has not wanted to stay solely in the technology sector. You want to be able to help people by bringing your technology closer. This is the case of the two development kits that we have talked about: CareKit and ResearchKit. The maxim of the Big Apple is that users do not understand the smartphone or tablet as just another device, but as a tool that can improve your health, or provide useful information that can improve your health.
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We will soon see how Apple develops more strategies and tools that continue to promote this goal, such as the news we knew a few days ago that a secret team of medical engineers were working on blood glucose monitoring without a digital glucometer, but through advanced technology capable of obtaining this data without 'pricking' the patients.