January 17, 2017
Penn Medicine/for PhillyVoice
Penn Medicine has launched an app for patients with sarcoidosis, a rare and chronic lung disease.
Researchers at Penn Medicine have launched an app that will hopefully lead to health improvements for patients with sarcoidosis, a rare and chronic lung disease.
The ResearchKit app will work two ways. First, patients with the disease who agree to download and use the app will get pertinent and individualized information on their iPhones about sarcoidosis, including information "directing them to specialists in their area based on their phone’s GPS." Second, the app will allow researchers to passively document patients' day-to-day symptoms to try to find trends on what causes flare-ups.
For example, Penn Medicine notes the app will look to draw correlations between the weather or a patient's physical activity level and a symptom flare-up.
The app development was led by Dr. Misha Rosenbach, an assistant professor of dermatology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research.
Read more at Penn Medicine.
