A new study is being launched by a team of researchers with an all-new app exclusively to address the health and wellness issues of those falling in the LGBT category. Developed by the University of California at San Francisco, this new ResearchKit app called The Pride Study will survey a number of LGBT people about the different kinds of health issues faced like smoking, obesity, cancer, depression, mental issues, HIV/AIDS, and so on.
The ResearchKit framework is an open-source one which was launched during Apple’s “Spring Forward” event held in March 2015. It has already been put in to use to develop Apps that conduct researched in various diseases like cancer, asthma, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and cardiovascular diseases by using the information collected via user surveys and the iPhone sensors.
ResearchKit has been called as “perhaps the most profound change and positive impact the iPhone will make on our health” by Tim Cook, Apple CEO. The study is called “PRIDE Study”, and it is meant to shed some light on the health needs exclusively related to the LGBT community.
The co-director of the PRIDE Study at UCSF, Mitchell Lunn, said,” The main question there is, what is the relationship between being LGBTQ or more broadly a sexual or gender minority person and mental and physical health.” A UCSF nephrologist, Lunn hopes that the study will be able to emerge successful in its attempt to address the health concerns of the transgender and bisexual people, which is usually an understudied part of the LGBT community.
“Ideally we would like to get tens of thousands of participants and follow people for decades, something like 30 years. The goal is to figure out how being a sexual or gender minority influences physical or mental health.”
All researchers are quite positive about the vast potential that lies in the concept of tapping and studying the large user base for the iPhone. This will help gather enough vital information to actually achieve the goals.
It is not an easy task to get people to voluntarily sign up for a medical test or get them to come to the clinics for this purpose. Most of them would be disinterested in undergoing such studies. They refuse all such things out of fear that they may be discriminated against. This makes the study a very tough one. With the iPhone app, it is easier to get people to sign up on it and submit their information on their phones from wherever they want. This saves them a lot of time and effort. It is a very delicate topic that needs to be addressed with that fact in mind.
The Pride Study also plans to take a survey to ask the people which health topics and concerns regarding the LGBT community they would like to study and address. User feedback will be appreciated in all steps. Using this feedback, the researchers at UCSF will be able to compile the requirements of the users and create the final survey questions.
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