With what was probably the most easily forgotten detail discussed yesterday at Apple’s press event, the introduction of Apple CareKit, the tech giant actively begins working with doctors, researchers and other types of medical staff to understand and study the various afflictions that can befall us. CareKit is somewhat similar to the default Health applications in the sense that it tracks a lot of information with a little assistance from the user. However, it focuses more on real health concerns rather than keeping in check a generic and healthy lifestyle.

CareKit is a new software framework that has been designed by Apple to allow developers to create various apps that keep track of different medical conditions. This framework can ultimately help both the user and medical staff; by monitoring symptoms, medication, reactions to the medication applied and plans, the users along their family members, doctors or nurses can take action a lot sooner with a variety of health concerns.

Not only that, but anyone can actively make use of CareKit to observe and understand their own health, to study the various effects that medication or different types of foods or sugars have on them. Similarly, researchers could make use of the data coming from numerous individuals to perform their own study or research, which can only truly result in a further betterment of healthcare worldwide.

CareKit will be released next month as an open source framework, allowing members of the developer community to create apps and build functionalities based on four basic modules that Apple is bringing alongside their software. The modules in question are:

• Care Card. This module will allow the user to plan actions such as taking medication or performing physical exercises as part of a therapy, allowing them to track their progress or set reminders using a variety of iDevices.
• Symptom and Measurement Tracker. This module is responsible for allowing the user to record a variety of data regarding symptoms, temperature, how they feel, pain levels or fatigue by the use of surveys, progressive timeline of photos or the sensors that are baked into the devices.
• Insight Dashboard. One of the simpler modules, Insight Dashboard is in charge of mapping symptoms next to the action items that have been entered into the system to show how treatments are working.
• Lastly, Connect. This is the part of the software that allows the user to communicate and share information with the parties involved, ranging from family members to doctors that are in charge of their medication and treatment.

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