iPhone Health Apps

Doctors praise iPhone apps for easy tracking of asthma, melanoma and Parkinson’s disease patients.

16:32 21 March 2017

An iPhone app called Asthma Health has been praised by doctors saying it is a helpful technology to medical research. The app, which has been downloaded more than 50,000 times, is connected with Apple’s ResearchKit, an open source framework that assists medical researchers in gathering data for studies.

 

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai surveyed individuals who have downloaded the app on their mobile phone and has found new information about asthma triggers such as pollen, heat and wildfire outbreaks. The same can be said for melanoma and Parkinson’s disease patients.

 

Yvonne Chan, the study's lead researcher and director of digital health and personalized medicine at a Mount Sinai institute, said that the mobile health tools have the capacity to “scale and accelerate” clinical research than before which can further improve patient care.

 

Other iPhone apps that have been helping the medical community include the Cognition Kit that is integrated with the Apple Watch and tracks depression and epilepsy. The tech-giant sensor development team is also currently working on a non-invasive diabetes sensor, which can tell if the wearer is getting sick.