The Apple Watch may help treat a key symptom of sickle cell disease and changes to Apple’s voice recognition algorithm could help people who stutter, new studies show.


According to a study by researchers from Duke University Day Hospital (via MyHealthyApple), the Apple Watch could help treat vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs), a key complication caused by sickle cell disease that often hospitalizes patients with severe pain. Research indicates that machine learning using health data collected by the Apple Watch can uncover patterns to predict pain in people with sickle cell disease, which could provide an early warning signal and enable treatment via painkillers and saline hydration before it gets worse.

The researchers enrolled patients with sickle cell disease in the day hospital for a VOC between July 2021 and September 2021 in the study, providing them with an Apple Watch Series 3 for the duration of their visit. 15,683 data points from heart rate, heart rate variability, and activity data from the Apple Watch were crossed with pain scores and vital signs from the hospital’s electronic medical record to create a machine learning model to predict VOCs.

In another recently published study presented by Colin Learesearcher at Apple who works on machine learning and accessibility-related features, it is proposed that changes to Apple’s speech recognition algorithm and machine learning could help alleviate problems for people who stutter, dramatically reducing clipped utterances and word error rates by nearly 80 percent.

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