Apple Makes CareKit Open Source Starting Today
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A month after Apple announced CareKit–its latest platform for developing personal healthcare apps–the company has made available four new iOS apps that use the platform. It has also made the platform’s functionality and features available to all apps starting today.

CareKit is a close cousin to ResearchKit, Apple’s healthcare platform for medical professionals to make research studies easier and more streamlined. With CareKit, the company’s aim is to give patients more and easier ways to prevent and control chronic health conditions. The two together demonstrate Apple’s strong desire to be a key player in the exploding health apps scene–for both patients and their doctors.

CareKit apps focus on making the daily process of monitoring long-term health problems–such as Type 1 diabetes or heart disease–easier by providing medication reminders, symptom trackers, pain scores, and even check-ins with doctors and nurses. The four new apps released today include: Start, an app to monitor depression and anxiety medications and symptoms, and to track progress, One Drop, to manage diabetes, and Glow Nurture and Glow Baby, which can monitor menstruation as well as track pregnancy and baby health.

Whether or not CareKit will take off remains to be seen, and will likely depend on whether doctors’ systems allow them to use CareKit, and also how well doctors and patients are able to work with it together. However, there are so many healthcare apps on the market today, with countless users. Many of those users are using more than one app, so having them all streamlined through one platform could be beneficial to the doctor and the patient, and allow people to have more control over their health.

Via Mashable, TechCrunch.