Apple Releases 4 CareKit Apps
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The move launches Apple straight into healthcare.
In March, Apple announced the launch of CareKit (an offshoot of Apple’s Research Kit), an open-source app development platform that allows users to take control and track their own medical care. Apple has followed up its introduction of CareKit with the release of the four CareKit apps.
The four new apps include One Drop, that helps patients manage their diabetes; Glow Nurture and Glow Baby, that help track pregnancy health and all aspects of baby care, respectively; Start, an app that helps identify and track symptoms and depression; and Iodine, which helps people find the right medicines for them. This is Apple’s first real foray into true healthcare, The Verge writes, going beyond scientific research or basic health tracking programs.
“Apps created with ResearchKit are already producing medical insights and discoveries at a pace and scale never seen before,” Apple explains on its website. “That success inspired us to widen the scope to personal care with the introduction of CareKit.”
CareKit allows developers to design iPhone apps to help consumers manage specific medical conditions and communicate with their physicians. CareKit apps are designed to be attractive not only to patients, but also to healthcare providers who want to keep tabs on their patients remotely.
In order to be successful, Apple will need to get healthcare providers on board to support the apps; until that happens, it is unclear how large an impact CareKit will have on the healthcare industry as a whole.
“I think it’s the future,” Arthur Caplan, a biomedical ethicist at New York University, told The Verge. Health management and communication Apps that that provide information to their doctors or hospitals are almost inevitable — and that’s not a bad thing, according to Caplan. However, Apple may find that the health care management field is more difficult to break into that other fields.
“The biggest challenge will be quality control and convincing doctors to use these apps,” he says. Physicians tend to be skeptical about anything that pegs itself as a way to reduce the time that patients have to meet with doctors face-to-face, and “doctors are not the most tech savvy folks,” he says. “So I think Apple had best be advised to go slow.”