Apple studies if Watch can monitor hearing, mobility, women’s health

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks about the Apple Watch during a new product event Tuesday.TONY AVELAR/ AP PHOTO

 Apple (AAPL) on Tuesday announced that it’s launching three research studies that will assess the Apple Watch’s capabilities in monitoring women’s medical conditions, hearing health, and mobility signals like heart rate and walking pace.

It’s the latest sign of Apple’s rising profile and ambition as a player in medical research — centered around a consumer gadget that has yet to demonstrate that it offers widespread health benefits for individuals or the population at large.

Apple will partner on the studies with the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, as well as leading academic medical institutions including the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and the University of Michigan.

The three planned projects have the following goals:

• The women’s health study will make use of the Apple Watch’s recently announced feature to allow women to track their menstrual periods. The goal is to use those data to inform screening and patients’ risk for conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome, infertility, and osteoporosis.
• The study on hearing health will rely on the Apple Watch’s new hearing monitoring features. The idea is to collect data over time to understand how the loud noises and sounds people are exposed to in everyday life can affect their long-term hearing health. Apple said it would share these data with the World Health Organization.
• The mobility study will use the wearable to collect data on people’s heart rate, walking pace, and how many flights of stairs they’ve climbed. It will then analyze those data to probe connections with hospitalizations, falls, cardiovascular health, and quality of life.

Apple’s news release said that the research “will reach more participants than has ever been possible,” but it did not specify enrollment targets for any of the three studies. Nor did it specify how long researchers would follow participants.

Apple previously enrolled more than 400,000 people in its Apple Heart Study conducted in partnership with Stanford University researchers. The results of that study were unveiled at a major cardiology meeting this past March; they showed that the Apple Watch can spot important heart rhythm changes. All told, 0.5 percent — or 2,161 people — were told that they might have atrial fibrillation, an arrhythmia that increases the risk of stroke and other conditions.

Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president for health, unveiled the news on stage at a big press event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday morning. She said the Apple Heart Study results were so encouraging that it pushed Apple executives to launch the new research.

Desai said that consumers who use an Apple Watch will be able to sign up to participate in the new studies via a new Research app that will be available for download in the Apple Store later this year. She did not say what criteria researchers would use — a typical feature of clinical research — to decide which would-be participants would be eligible to sign up.

Apple launching studies testing whether Apple Watch can monitor hearing, mobility, and women’s health