After the resounding early success of ResearchKit, Apple has introduced a new companion platform, CareKit, for developers to build iOS apps that help people better manage health conditions. The news came Monday at Apple’s scheduled iPhone/iPad event at company headquarters in Cupertino, California.
Like ResearchKit, CareKit will be an open-source framework. Apple plans on releasing it in April.
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“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,” Apple COO Jeff Williams said. “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.”
Apple said that it developed four CareKit modules in time for Monday’s unveiling:
- Care Card, to assist people in tracking their own care plans and action items, including medication reminders;
- Symptom and Measurement Tracker, for observations of daily living and data capture from connected devices;
- Insight Dashboard, which compares symptoms to the action items in Care Card to help assess whether treatments are working; and
- Connect, facilitating communication between patients and their clinicians, caregivers and family members.
Announced partners include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Texas Medical Center, Sage Bionetworks, diabetes startup One Drop, Iodine‘s Start app and pregnancy startup Glow.
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The CareKit introduction may have been the highlight of the Apple event. Critics seemed to pan the whole presentation in general and the newly announced, smaller iPhone SE in particular.
Summary of #AppleEvent: CareKit is awesome. For everything else, here are fun-sized gadgets while we continue brainstorming actual ideas
— Andrew Gebhart (@GebAndrew) March 21, 2016
Meantime, here’s a new Apple video about ResearchKit. It features Duke Health, the University of Rochester (which we’ve written about) and Johns Hopkins Medicine (also covered in MedCity News) and discusses uses for autism, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
Photo: Apple
