Dos conciencias

A new app using Apple’s ResearchKit aims to understand the health of an understudied population.

A man waves a rainbow flag during the annual Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Ariel Schalit / AP

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 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.

"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?" Mitchell Lunn, co-director of The PRIDE Study and a clinical research fellow at UCSF, told BuzzFeed News. The app is debuting in June, LGBT Pride Month, just days before San Francisco's annual Pride parade and ahead of an expected Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.

Apple

"It is a research project that has very few peers in terms of scope and in terms of number of people and length of time," said Hector Vargas, executive director of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality, one of 42 organizations advising The PRIDE Study app.

Lunn said Apple employees were enthusiastic about the app, given the company's advocacy for LGBT equality under CEO Tim Cook, who said he was "proud to be gay" in a Bloomberg Businessweek article last October, and more recently criticized state legislation that could allow business owners to deny service to LGBT customers based on the owners' religious beliefs.

The PRIDE Study app, now available in the App Store or by texting PRIDESTUDY to 74121, is the latest to be built on ResearchKit, Apple's software framework that allows clinicians to conduct research through iPhone apps. Until now, the only available ResearchKit apps — for heart disease, breast cancer, Parkinson's disease, asthma, and diabetes — have been the five that went live at the time of Apple's announcement in March.

---

View Entire List ›