Building tools to advance research and care. One app at a time.
Take your work further with ResearchKit and CareKit.
Care providers and researchers from all over the world are producing new medical discoveries and advancing patient care with apps built using ResearchKit and CareKit – our open source code. With ResearchKit, CareKit and other tools you can develop an app that can drive health science through research at scale, or change the way you deliver care to patients beyond the confines of a lab or doctor's office. Discover how an app could take your work further and join a global community that is transforming health through technology.
ResearchKit
Take research out of the lab.
With ResearchKit, you can build apps that enroll more participants and conduct studies at a scale never seen before. Move beyond the lab and reach people wherever they are for a more robust, real-world cohort.
UNC conducts the largest study ever on postpartum depression.
CareKit
Get a better picture of your patients’ health.
Apps built with CareKit engage patients in their care and recovery by giving them the opportunity to track and share daily progress from their devices. Now care providers have the chance to connect with patients outside of regular visits, and gather insights to provide better care.
Johns Hopkins reinvents cardiac patient care with Corrie Health.
ResearchKit and CareKit work together seamlessly.
Each framework has its own customizable modules that can be used to create an app for research or care. Whether your app is used to conduct a research study or to offer better patient care, you can utilize elements of both frameworks to create it.
Gather informed consent
Build personalized care plans
Create surveys
Visualize trends
Conduct active evaluations
Connect with patients
Explore the possibilities.
Capture relevant data at scale and derive valuable insights with a variety of different modules from ResearchKit and CareKit. Here is just a snapshot of what you can do.
Postpartum depression (PPD), is one of the most common complications of childbirth, and yet much remains unknown about this condition. Approximately one in seven women experience PPD and some of its most devastating consequences include maternal suicide, infanticide, and reduced maternal sensitivity leading to adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes for the child.
This led UNC School of Medicine to create Mom Genes Fight PPD (formerly PPD ACT), an iOS app they used to recruit, consent, screen, and enable DNA collection from women with a lifetime history of PPD. Mom Genes Fight PPD was designed to understand why some women are afflicted with postpartum depression and others aren’t based on genetics.
“We were able to use ResearchKit to bring PPD research to a much larger population compared to traditional studies that require participants to visit specific research centers.”
—Quote bySamantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH
Since its launch, the app has reached over 17,000 downloads enabling the team to tap into a huge participant population and collect approximately 4,000 genetic samples. The scale of the study also drove genome-wide association studies.
Now, UNC researchers are able to accurately determine reliability of which childbirth preceded the worst episode, participant's age at the worst episode, and duration of the worst episode in a cohort larger than any studied previously. The scale of the study,and the number of participants recruited has the team at UNC hopeful that they are well on their way to understanding the genetic signature of postpartum mood disorders. This critical knowledge will improve detection, prevention, and treatment of postpartum depression.
The weeks following a heart attack, or myocardial infarction, are crucial to recovery. In fact, unplanned readmissions after hospitalization for acute myocardial infarction are among the leading causes of preventable morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs.
The Corrie Health program, centered around an app created by physicians at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is giving patients greater control over their recovery and reducing readmission rates. The app, which leverages ResearchKit, CareKit, and Apple Watch,allows for remote monitoring and continuous data collection so providers can have better insight into their patients’ health status and recovery progress.
This mobile health solution aims to reinvent the cardiac patient’s experience by: helping them improve skills for diet, exercise, and medication habits, connecting them to resources helpful to recovery, introducing them to mindfulness techniques for improving awareness and emotional strength, and recording data on steps, heart rate,and blood pressure. Data are captured with the help of an Apple Watch and Bluetooth blood pressure cuff that writes data directly to the Health app and is shared via HealthKit to the Corrie Health app.