Apple is researching a suite of technologies to help diagnose depression and cognitive decline with its smartphones.
The goal is to add hardware and applications that can expand the scope of its increasingly comprehensive offering of health tools.
It would do so using a series of data collected by special sensors installed in iPhones.
According to an exclusive post by The Wall Street Journal, the Cupertino company researchers hope to be able to detect digital signals associated with the conditions of both diseases.
The US newspaper cites internal Apple sources and documents that were analyzed by WSJ.
According to early studies, the idea is include more sensors that capture variations in the mobility of smartphone users, in their physical activity, sleep patterns and behavior when writing on typing screens, among other variables.
With that information, the researchers hope to be able to detect digital signals associated with conditions of depression and cognitive development so that algorithms can be created to reliably detect these conditions.
Apple hopes it will become the foundation for unique features that spread across all of its devices, from phones to tablets to Apple Watches.
Health marketing is one of the lines of business development that Apple has been applying the most in recent years. Without big changes to their phones, the bet is to “empower doctors,” as he explains in his own Web.
“Doctors around the world are using the iPhone to transform the way we view health. Applications created with ResearchKit are already producing medical knowledge and discoveries at a rate and scale never seen before, ”explains the company led by Tim Cook.
“That success has inspired us to expand the reach of medical research to personal care with the introduction of CareKit, a framework for developers to create applications that allow you to manage your own wellness on a daily basis,” he adds.
On the website of Apple Mexico, and speaking of iOS 15, the company explains the benefits of the Health app. It says that “it organizes your most important health information and allows you to access it easily, securely and from one place”, now with “increased functionality.”
“You will have new ways to share data with your loved ones, an indicator to measure your stability when walking and the risk of falling, as well as a trend analysis that will help you understand the changes in your health,” he adds.