Editorial Staff
The app was launched last March during Apple’s Spring Forward event. Since then it has been used for various purposes all related to the study and collecting of as much data as possible. The research kit App has been used to create other apps to conduct research on various issues like, diabetes, asthma, heart related problems, breast cancer and Parkinson’s disease. To collect the information, the iPhone sensors and user surveys are being used. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has termed the Research kit as, “perhaps the most profound change and positive impact that the iPhone will make on our health.”
The study has been named the “Pride Study” and is meant to shed some light on the unique health needs of the LGBT community. The study is exclusively focused on the LGBT folks and could be the biggest study till now to be focused on this minority community. Mitchell Lunn, co-director of the study at UCSF said,” The main question there is, what is the relationship between being LGBT–or more broadly a sexual or a gender minority person—and mental and physical health.” Lunn was also hoping that the study will be useful in addressing the health concerns of transgender and bisexual people, an understudied segment of the LGBT population.
The idea of taking surveys through apps has been appreciated by many people since it doesn’t involve going somewhere or interacting with strangers. You can just connect through the app and submit your responses. It removes the hassle of finding people for the study, bring them to one place and get their responses. The LGBT health advocates have also shown their support towards this idea and are hopeful about vast potential of tapping into the massive iPhone user base in the community. The UCSF researchers will create the final survey questions after getting response from the people about which topics they want the survey to focus on.
Gollapalli Nithin Kumar
