The Apple Watch continues to play a crucial role in medical research studies around the world. This week, the University of Michigan Health has published early results from what it calls a “landmark, three-year observational study” that it first started in 2018 in collaboration with Apple.
As detailed in a new blog post from the University of Michigan Health, the goal of the study is to “enroll a diverse set of participants across a range of ages, races, ethnicities, and underlying health conditions” and to provide insight into the baseline health status of a representative group of thousands of people.
Jessica Golbus, M.D., serves as a co-investigator of the study and touts that one of the “biggest successes” of the study was its ability to “recruit from groups that have largely been underrepresented or unrepresented in digital health research.” According to the data, 18% of the more than 6,700 participants were 65 or older, 17% were Black, and 17% were Asian.
The goal of the study was to “describe and compare key wearable signals (ie, heart rate, step count, and home blood pressure measurements) across age, sex, race, ethnicity, and clinical phenotypes.”
