Apple’s Venture into Healthcare via CareKit and ResearchKit – March Event

As Readers will remember, AppleToolBox was first to break the news last year about Apple’s conversation with the FDA. For a while now, we were all thinking that the Apple Watch and other Apple products are going to be integrated into providing more health care offerings beyond the exercise app and activity monitors.

At the Event today, we learned that Apple is positioning its new CareKit app as a big offering for its customers. The kit will track your to-do list, a symptom tracker and uses accelerometer to test range of motion. You can share the data with our family and doctor, and then doctor can just update your care plan right there from the data. This is going to be huge if successful.

With the rapid rise in population of baby boomers, there has always been a need in the market place to provide devices that can track patient activity information etc. Jeff Williams from Apple also suggested that the company is planning to use CareKit for post-surgical regimens. Other areas of potential use include researching Parkinson’s and using the data to improve patient care.

There is already a new CareKit app for Parkinson’s disease. It is going to be used by a number of institutions to track the effectiveness of the drugs and exercise regimen of the patients. The company is also making steady progress in offering an App that will predict seizures for epileptic patients. Along the same path, Apple is also offering ResearchKit to help medical research.

“With ResearchKit, we quickly realized the power of mobile apps for running inexpensive, high-quality clinical studies with unprecedented reach,” said Ray Dorsey, MD, David M. Levy Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “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.”

As we move forward from this event today, it is very clear that we will see Apple improve upon its dominance in the Wearable category. With the use of Apple Watch , phone and a slew of new apps, it intends on positioning itself as a key player. The health care vertical is going to be important for Apple given the size of the economics for this industry. If Apple’s technology can facilitate reduction of transaction costs or improve upon efficiency in this market, it will be a major breakthrough for Apple.

SK( Managing Editor )

Obsessed with tech since the early arrival of A/UX on Apple, Sudz (SK) is responsible for the editorial direction of AppleToolBox. He is based out of Los Angeles, CA.

Sudz specializes in covering all things macOS, having reviewed dozens of OS X and macOS developments over the years.

In a former life, Sudz worked helping Fortune 100 companies with their technology and business transformation aspirations.