IPhone medical app boosts research projects

The app tracks seizures and the responsiveness of a person during the event. The Active Task module enables researchers to gather more targeted data for their study by inviting participants to perform activities that generate data using iPhone’s advanced sensors. The two universities launched the Autism & Beyond app as a way to track autism in a child’s early life. While the app isn’t for diagnosing autism, it is a way for families to receive feedback about how to deal with tantrums and when to seek out additional help from healthcare providers. When someone enrolled in the study senses a seizure is about to happen, he or she can then activate the app – or have a caregiver activate it – to collect information on what’s to come. Much like other apps, its objective is to help researchers create a database with images and other data generated by users on a monthly basis.

John’s Hopkins University wants to develop an app that can be used to detect future seizures. But the app is still useful for the patients who are participating in the study.

ResearchKit is still bogged down by a lack of supported countries. The effort, which collects data via the iPhone and, in a few cases, an Apple Watch, is a part of a greater effort to ultimately improve patients’ health and the ability to care for them.

When users download EpiWatch, they’ll be asked to read information about the study and give a signature to show informed consent; participants must be 16 or older and have both an Apple Watch and an iPhone, Crone said.

“Right now when [patients] journal their seizures, they keep a scrap of paper with them and write it down”, Crone said.

IPhones are to be used to study autism in children in an experiment that uses its front-facing camera to measure how they react to videos. The new studies are being run by researchers in Duke University, Johns Hopkins and Oregon Health and Science University.

The Apple Watch is being used to help sufferers of epilepsy, by using the gadget’s many sensors to record their movement and heartbeat before, during and after a seizure. The app also uses Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor, since heart rate can rise significantly during seizures. Like the Johns Hopkins app, for now they’re meant for research more than treatment or diagnosis. The app is essentially a developmental screening tool, which will tell users when a mole has gone from benign to potentially unsafe. After meeting one of the heads of Sage Bionetworks at a conference, Webster was introduced to the team at Oregon Health and Sciences University, which led to the relaunch of Mole Mapper as a ResearchKit study this week.

One of the more controversial segments of mobile medical apps has been dermatology, and especially melanoma-focused apps. The app tracks medication intake, seizure duration, and other factors. The app will photograph and measure mole size over time, and participants can document their mole changes and share them directly with health professionals.