The National Institutes of Health, Apple, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have announced a research partnership for a major long-term study of women’s health. The collaboration will permit researchers to study conditions including pregnancy, infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome, menopausal transition, and osteoporosis. Apple’s new Research App will help users participate in the study and may be downloaded here.
The intention is to improve women’s health by identifying the factors that impact women from around the country. This new study will connect academic medical institutions, healthcare organizations, and Apple products with the goal of contributing to medical science and helping to create the next generation of innovative health software.
The new study will allow participants to track their menstrual cycles and help researchers understand their relationship to other health-related conditions that affect women. The cycle tracking data from participants’ Apple devices will help inform the development of innovative products for menstrual cycles, risk assessment, and screening of gynecologic conditions.
“Studies conducted with commercial cycle and fertility tracking apps have great potential for making important contributions to science, because they can enroll much larger samples of women and from far more diverse backgrounds,” said Allen Wilcox, scientist emeritus at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “We want to do our part to make this new method of data collection a scientifically valid source of health information.”