It's hard for Chinese homosexuals to come out, especially if they've landed jobs in a government office. (Photo : REUTERS)
Medical researchers have created an iPhone app that will help them assessing the unique health issues faced by the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer) community.
The iPhone app is called PRIDE Study and launched by researchers from University of California, San Francisco, with the aim of studying the LGBTQ health issues. It works with the ResearchKit, letting LGBTQ users to contribute to the study before it begins. There are questions that users need to answer so researchers can help the researchers do their job in understanding better the health issues under the LGBTQ community.
PRIDE Study was launched fir the first time last week and collecting the data from the targeted users will help in the creation of the largest database of the physical, social and mental issues of brothers and sisters from the LGBTQ community.
Mitchell Lunn, the study's co-director, the key question in the app is how physical and mental health is related to being someone from the LGBTQ community. Several questions like these appear in the PRIDE study app: Are LGBTQ members at higher risk for social anxiety? and Are LGBTQ people more likely to have certain types of cancer?
Apple's HealthKit is the framework of the PRIDE study. It has dashboard, activity monitoring, community where individual users can create a profile, and a place where literature can be found. Users can voice out their health concerns to the researchers via creating topics. After collecting the data, researchers will use it to create questionnaires that will appear in the same app in between six to nine months from now, Slash Gear reported.
Researchers and advocates of LGBTQ health are hoping that the app will be useful when dealing with different health issues faced by bisexual and transgender people. The app will allow people o just submit data on their iPhones without visiting clinics at all, according to The Hoop News.
People who want to participate in the PRIDE study can install the app, free to download from iTunes, or by just visiting the website.
