PoopMD is a pediatric app for parents designed by a gastroenterologist at Johns Hopkins that analyzes babies’ stool for signs of biliary atresia. And now it includes ResearchKit to help understand how parents are using the app and the impact it may be having.
Designed by a team led by an expert in biliary atresia, Dr. Douglas Mogul at Johns Hopkins University, PoopMD analyzes infant stools for signs of biliary atresia. It also has a lot of great educational material for parents on normal and abnormal infant stools.
When we first reviewed PoopMD, we had some concerns about the automatic stool analysis. Later, a study was published testing the accuracy of the PoopMD app by analyzing a set of normal and abnormal images of infant stools.
With this ResearchKit integration, PoopMD+ will aggregate the stool images collected by parents and the results of the analysis. It will then deliver a survey a few weeks later to find out what sort of follow up happened and the outcome of that follow up. Importantly, it will also include questions about the worry and anxiety generated by the results of the analysis.
This ResearchKit integration is one of the first additions we’ve seen to an existing health app. Perhaps that’s something we’ll see more of in the future as existing ResearchKit apps begin to show some results and more services, like Axon from Medable, arise to support that kind of development work.
Check out our full list of ResearchKit apps here.
Source: Press Release
