Imagine that you are in the gym. Your workout is going great and you do exercise after exercise. Suddenly your iPhone starts zooming. “Your heartbeat is going too fast. Take a rest before you start with the next exercise”. Soon, this will be reality. In the close future, your iPhone will give you personal health advise on the basis of data that the mobile phone gathers.
Apple has already introduced the HealthKit app. So far, this app mostly functioned as a tracker of data (e.g. heartbeat, sleep patterns etc), but it will be used eventually to interpret these data in order to turn it into advice for users, doctors and scientists. The HealthKit will become a valuable health data source via the ResearchKit and the CareKit. Apps created with ResearchKit are producing medical insights and discoveries at an enormously pace and scale, solely meant for research. These apps make it easier for healthcare to filter important information from large amounts of data. The success of these apps has led to the widening of the scope to personal care; the CareKit. The CareKit helps you to manage your own well being on a daily basis. You can manage your own health, as tools are created that track for example your symptoms and medications, which are subsequently shared with the care team. Dr. Ray Dorsey from University of Rochester states the following: “We are trying to bring care to patients, wherever they are, right on their phones”.
The CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, wants to secure new sources of revenue. The introduction of the HealthKit and looking at the features is will have in the close future, will make customers more dependent on the Apple devices. Each clinical study performed with the use of the ResearchKit brings Apple a step closer to embedding itself in the global healthcare industry. An example of such a clinical study is Duke University that developed a ResearchKit app that screens for and diagnoses autism by kids at a young age, by using the iPhone’s front facing camera that conducts facial recognition checks.
Apple’s greatest hurdle for now is to prove to medical professionals that the gathered data through these apps is reliable. If they succeed, will your iPhone turn out to be your doctor eventually?
Sources:
https://developer.apple.com/healthkit/
http://www.apple.com/researchkit/
http://www.nu.nl/internet/4327371/apple-gaat-adviezen-opstellen-basis-van-gezondheidsdata-healthkit.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-26/apple-said-to-expand-healthkit-from-tracker-to-diagnosis-tool
Thanks for your post! It’s brilliant to see that we can get a device which warns us when our body is in danger. However, it’s also brings other topics which needs to be discussed. As you say, maybe in the future a mobile application will become our own doctor. But what if the application is wrong in some ways? Humans will trust the application but when it tells you wrong information about your health this can create danger situations. Maybe the application says you are healthy so you won’t go to a real doctor. And after three months you are so sick that you go to the physic doctor and the doctor tells you’re too late for full recovery. He also mentioned if you went to him a few months earlier you would recover totally. Due to the application you’re too late for full recovery. Can you blame the application?
You can also look at it the other way around. When the application says you’re sick and in fact you’re not. It can deliver a lot of stress when a device is sure about you’re being sick. Don’t you think?
Maybe these situation are a little bit rare to occur but the main question is who will be responsible for the failure of the application. When bringing the doctor application on the market you have to think about this legal things. In my opinion it should be great if new applications can help us with our health issues but it should never replace the job of a doctor in total. Humans are complex creatures and sometimes also need special attention in a psychological way. I think an application will never be possible to fully understand the feelings of a human being. The HealthKit app is a great development in giving attention to our health life but will hopefully not replace the real doctor.
Hi Wessel, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You are addressing big challenges that Apple has to face. We cannot be sure that the data the iPhone gathers is always reliable, which can possibly lead to the problems you described correctly. Therefore, that is going to be the greatest hurdle for Apple at the moment. I agree completely with you that there should be legal regulations and that it should be clear who is to blame when someone indeed trusts the advice the iPhone gives, while this is wrong information. However, the project is still in its infancy and it will take a long time until these functionalities are ready to use. My question if the iPhone will turn out to be your doctor eventually was just something I was wondering myself. I agree that we should always be able to receive personal medical care from skilled and qualified doctors. But maybe it is not a bad thing if the iPhone will be a kind of personal advisor. Time will tell what will happen. In the meantime, these developments can mean a lot for the healthcare research world and can help a lot of clinical studies to find relevant outcomes.