We don’t know as much as we’d like about the role sexual orientation and gender identity play in health and wellness. And though there’s a clear need for it, comprehensive medical research into the health needs of the LGBT population can be tough to find. The Institute of Medicine summed it up this way in 2011: LGBT people “have unique health experiences and needs, but as a nation, we do not know exactly what these experiences and needs are.” It wasn’t until two years ago that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s annual National Health Interview Survey even accounted for sexual orientation.
Now, a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is gearing up for what may prove to be the largest national study of LGBT health ever — and it’s using the iPhone to do it.
Dubbed The PRIDE Study, the effort will use an iPhone app based on Apple’s new ResearchKit software framework to assess the special health needs of the LGBT population. UCSF researchers plan to survey people about a broad range of health risk factors that may include HIV/AIDS, smoking, cancer, obesity, and depression. And they hope that the PRIDE Study app and the iPhone’s vast user base will deepen medical research into transgender and bisexual individuals — both relatively understudied populations compared to lesbians and gay men.
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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: Apple’s iPhone Is Powering A Massive LGBT Health Study
