Apple has partnered with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to launch a three-year study to understand how sleep, physical activity, heart rate and daily routines can affect anxiety and depression.
Begun this week, the study was co-designed by UCLA and Apple researchers and will use Apple's own iPhone, Apple Watch, and Beddit sleep time recorder. UCLA and Apple hope the study "will revolutionize the detection and treatment of depression."
Linking quantitative data such as heart rate, sleep and physical activity with symptoms of anxiety and depression has the potential to allow health care managers to observe warning signs and prevent the onset of depressive episodes, monitor the treatments and find the causes of depression. UCLA professor of psychiatry Dr. Nelson Freimer, the study's principal investigator, says:
“This collaboration, which leverages UCLA's extensive research experience with Apple's innovative technologies, has the potential to transform healthcare research and clinical care. Current approaches to treating depression rely almost entirely on the subjective feedback provided by the depressed patients themselves. This is an important step in obtaining objective and precise measurements that guide both diagnosis and treatment ”.
The pilot phase of the study begins this week and will include 150 participants recruited from UCLA Health patients. The main phases of the study will take place between 2021 and 2023 and will collect data from 3.000 participants from both UCLA Health patients and UCLA students, so it is not a study included in Apple's Health app.
The data will be analyzed by Apple and UCLA once all types of personal identifiers have been encrypted and removed.
