Apple Hopes You’ll Talk to Your iPhone and Call Your Doctor in the Morning
Apple wants doctors to tell patients to use their iPhone to track their conditions at home.
by Antonio Regalado March 21, 2016
Apple wants to put its devices at the center of health care by figuring out how to solve medicine’s version of the last-mile problem. Today, Apple launched software to help hospitals and others more easily create apps that let patients manage their own conditions, such as by following a digital version of doctors’ orders, recording and tracking symptoms (with medical selfies, among other methods), using dashboards to check their progress against recovery goals, and uploading reports to hospital medical records systems.
The CareKit framework, which will be released to developers in about a month, sprang out of Apple’s experience since last year with medical research projects carried out on the iPhone. One, a study of Parkinson’s disease, suggested that an app that asks volunteers to perform finger taps and other dexterity tests on their phones could help patients adjust their drugs and might actually be able to diagnose the disease.
March 21, 2016