The Asthma Health app from Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai, has been downloaded some 2,500 times, he tells Fox News.
The app, which was featured during Apple's Spring Forward event, uses Apple's ResearchKit, an open source software framework, to enable people with asthma to take part in research studies using their iPhones.
Meanwhile, Fox adds that Schadt's Resilience Study is searching for people who carry disease-linked mutations but don't show signs of the condition. So far, he says 5,000 people have signed up to take part in the study, and he hopes to reach 50,000 people by the end of the year.
"Our view is that these individuals carry far more insight into the disease," Schadt says. "Finding out why they are protected against the disease could be a therapeutic that is provided to other people."
He also tells Fox that the intersection of genetics and technology has been a focus throughout his career. "I have always embraced the current technologies that enable us to take better snapshots of living systems," Schadt says.