Apple recently introduced Carekit, an open-source mobile software framework that supports health apps.
The company touted the platform last month, saying that it will assist coders in crafting better health apps to fit devices that run on iOS.
Four iPhone apps were designed on CareKit already.
Two of them come from Glow and are the Glow Nurture and Glow Baby, respectively. The third one, Start, is an app coming from Iodine, and it is built to monitor patients who take anti-depressants. Last but not least, One Drop is a tracker for diabetes.
Apple selected which companies will be the first to try out CareKit, and One Drop is one of them.
The app that the enterprise created keeps up with diabetes-relevant metrics. Additionally, it shares anonymous data between patients who have the illness, allows for health guidelines to be established and shares periodic reports with physicians. According to One Drop chief Jeff Dachis, the company was able to come up with the app independently. However, CareKit offered a simple and compelling framework that made development smooth and elegant.
The Glow apps are catering to the well-being of pregnant women and their infants. Glow's Nurture and Baby apps use Carekit to send a PDF of progress to the medical team, your spouse or other caregivers. Should your baby be suffering from indigestion for a few days or sporting a low fever, a simple tap will inform your pediatric doctor in an instant. Glow is also considering making use of CareKit for other apps such as a period tracking app.
Start is the fourth app that works thanks to CareKit. It is targeted toward people that wrestle with depression. The app is designed so that users find it easy to share their progress with doctors. By sending out the PHQ-9 score, a.k.a. the clinical measure for depression, the patient takes active part in the curing process.
CareKit reminds us a bit of another Apple framework, ResearchKit. Similarly to ResearchKit, the medical framework could prove to be an important tool for scientific breakthroughs. By tapping into the patients' data collected by the apps running on CareKit, Apple could assist medical research by offering huge batches of relevant data.
