More studies are highlighting what Apple Watch can do to help patients suffering from certain conditions.
Recently, a team of researchers from Duke University and other institutes came up with interesting results about the smartwatch's capability in predicting the pain of people who have sickle cell disease.
Apple Watch Helps Scientists to Better Understand Pain
To start, sickle cell disease or SCD is a group of red blood cell disorders that is inherited by a person. People with this kind of condition have a crescent-shaped or sickle-shaped red blood cell.
While a bone marrow transplant is possible to treat this disease, it still comes with a variety of significant risks to consider.
According to 9to5Mac, the researchers were able to understand how Apple Watch data helps them in predicting the pain experience from vaso-occlusive crises or VOCs.
Apple Watch Experiment
As part of the study, the researchers asked the patients from Duke University's Day Hospital if it was fine for them to participate in the trials. All of them have sickle cell disease.
The report says that the data collection for the research took place between July 2021 and September 2021.
All of the participants wore the Apple Watch Series 3. The team recorded all health-related trackers including calorie count, calculated heart rate variability, and more.
Furthermore, the researchers utilized machine learning models to see the potential methods that can help them understand the trends in pain from patients suffering from VOCs.
"Data were analyzed using 3 different machine learning models: multinomial logistic regression, gradient boosting, and random forest, and 2 null models, to assess the accuracy of pain scores. The evaluation metrics considered were accuracy (F1-score), area under the receiving operating characteristic curve, and root-mean-square error (RMSE)," the researchers said in a study.
As MyHealthyApple writes, the team was amazed to see that the Apple Watch is proven to be a feasible and low-cost approach that can help in the treatment of sickle cell disease.
To view the study entitled "Predicting Pain in People With Sickle Cell Disease in the Day Hospital Using the Commercial Wearable Apple Watch: Feasibility Study," visit Pub Med for more details.
Apple Watch as a Key to Help Stuttering Patients
Apple's research scientist Collin Lea submitted a new study where the Apple Watch is showcased to be a helpful tool to address the needs of people with speech disorders.
According to Macrumors, the smartwatch is seen to be effective for people who often stutter. The study says that using Apple Watch can decrease errors in words and utterances by almost 80%.
The study entitled "From User Perceptions to Technical Improvement: Enabling People Who Stutter to Better Use Speech Recognition" is now accessible in PDF.
