Roger Fingas
The MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper is using the Apple Watch to improve the treament regimens of breast cancer patients, citing the advantages of wearables in getting people to change their behavior.
In a pilot project, the New Jersey-based center is partnering with Polaris Health Directions to fit about 30 patients with 38mm Sport models, each with a pink strap, mHealth News reported this week. Polaris will underwrite the Watches, and is developing a HealthKit-compatible app to go with it. The company's senior VP of Labs and Innovation, Mark Redlus, said that future projects could make use of ResearchKit.
The app will connect to Polaris' Polestar behavioral health outcomes management platform, and give both patients and healthcare providers a way of monitoring things like activity, moods, and sleep. Patients will reportedly be taught about their own behaviors, and might receive alerts if for instance they're not getting enough exercise.
The project will cover people during two stages of cancer: the first immediately after they've been diagnosed, the second after treatment is finished. In both cases, the concern is how patients cope with anxiety and depression.
Efforts will be subject to review and approval by the Cooper Institutional Review Board, while MD Anderson Cooper will pick the patients and run treatment.
Although the device's sensors only track motion and heartrate, a handful of medical programs involving the Apple Watch have been announced since the product's launch last month. Earlier in May for example, Louisiana's Ochsner Health System began a trial using the Watch to treat hypertension.
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19 Comments
That's interesting. I find the activity notifications & tracking useful. It will be interesting to see what the results are of this study.
This is why Apple watch will kill other smart (quite dumb too) watches on the market.
The big medical sensor missing on the Apple watch is blood pressure. If they can incorporate a reliable bp sensor the watch will rule. I'm not sure about the science in that area but I have had exposure to the vagaries of cuffs used in traditional methods. I'm very sure Apple know this already and are working on it.
The prevailing evidence is that a patient's mood and mental outlook, in terms of negative or positive thinking has no affect on patient outcomes or the course of this horrible disease. The idea that a wearable device for the usage outlined in this article is being 'used for cancer treatment' is nausea inducing.
Nice try but analysts are already killing any hope for decent AppleWatch sales as they say the device is rather useless and demand has gone down the tubes. Wall Street intends to chew Tim Cook up and spit him out like pig fodder because he's not able to replicate what Steve Jobs had done in terms of creating a "must have" product. You watch how the cries of "fire Tim Cook" come back when only 15 million AppleWatches are sold this year. It's really sad to have to follow in Steve Jobs footsteps.