Apple CareKit

2016: Announcement

On March 21, 2016 the American corporation Apple submitted the CareKit platform by means of which software developers will be able to create medical software.

The framework of CareKit has an open source code and contains four main modules:

CareKit is new software environment for the sphere of telemedicine

• Care Card. In this module the possibility of tracking accomplishment of the plan of treatment and medical recommendations is implemented. About whether the patient takes medicine and whether executes the registered physical exercises, sensors in smartphones and the smartwatch will be able to monitor.

• Symptom and Measurement Tracker. This module of maintaining statistics saves information on symptoms and health. For example, it is possible to write data on body temperature, to note the level of pain or fatigue. 

• Insight Dashboard. In this module communication between existence of symptoms and accomplishment of recommendations about data of Care Card is implemented and also the evident efficiency of a course of treatment is shown.

• Connect. Provides exchange of medical information. Patients will be able to send data on the health to the attending physician or close people. At the same time the possibility of discussion of this information is stated.

The environment for development of telemedicine of CareKit will be available to developers in April, 2016.

Along with the announcement of this Apple service announced expansion of opportunities of an open software platform ResearchKit. In it added a feature for carrying out researches in such areas as a postnatal depression, cardiovascular diseases and asthma.

Using ResearchKit researchers can forget about packs of hand-written polls and long questionnaires, and also  about  storage costs of these data. ResearchKit allows people to fill out questionnaires and to participate in  polls directly on iPhone, and to doctors and  researchers — to find more time directly for researches, reported in Apple.[1]

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