On Thursday, April 28, Apple has launched its new CareKit framework, a health platform composed of four applications. The CareKit platform allows developers to build advanced software solutions for reporting, tracking and managing various medical conditions.
According to Apple Insider, Apple announced its CareKit platform in March, presenting it as a smaller scale open-source tool similar to the ResearchKit, Apple's other open source framework. Apple made available to developers its ResearchKit in April 2015, enabling the design of iPhone apps for medical research purposes.
The new Apple CareKit framework comes to facilitate the secure collection of user health data, either for sharing with healthcare professionals or for personal use.
The launch of Apple's CareKit is limited to four apps, according to TechCrunch.
The health apps included in the CareKit platform are as follows: the diabetes monitoring app One Drop, the fertility tracker Glow Nurture, the depression medication tracker Start and the maternity app Glow Baby. All of the CareKit's health apps cater to iPhone users. The health apps platform is available on GitHub.
Apple's CareKit allows developers to integrate into their apps four-key interactive modules. The Care Card can be configured to manage wellness tasks like exercise and medication consumption. The Progress Card contains a Symptom and Measurement tracker for logging physical indicators like heart rate, hunger and pain levels.
Care Card and Progress Card data are displayed and can be compared in the module called Insight Dashboard. The last module called Connect allows medical practitioners to have access to health data shared by its users.
With the Apple's CareKit is easy to securely share personal data with doctors and supporting hospitals, since the platform is compliant with Epic and other major healthcare records systems. MacRumors reports that the open source platform CareKit is offering some useful integration, such as sending images of an injury, monitoring of medical symptoms, and keeping tabs on medication schedules.
The benefits offered by Apple's CareKit work two-ways. The health apps platform helps patients to observe their progress over time as much as it helps doctors to monitor their patients.
