Siri Shortcuts: Added Accessibility Can Help Save Lives
Siri Shortcuts, which will be rolled out with the release of iOS 12, will take Apple’s voice assistant to a new level of functionality.
On top of the native Siri Shortcuts app, Apple is opening the gates to developers, allowing them to add support for Siri Shortcuts in their own apps. Philips has already announced that its range of smart home lighting solutions, Philips Hue, will support Siri Shortcuts.
MyTherapy, a leading health and medication reminder app with more than one million users, will also be among the first to support Siri’s new functionality. In doing so, Siri will help MyTherapy in its mission to cut down the number of premature deaths caused by wrongly taken or skipped medication. 125,000 such deaths occur each year in the US alone.
With the release of iOS 12, MyTherapy users will need to say no more than “Hey Siri, check my meds”. Siri will respond by telling the user if medications are due to be taken, which ones, and when. In a follow-up release, users will also be able to use Siri for tracking measurements such as weight or blood pressure, without the need to open the app directly.
Sebastian Gaede, CEO of smartpatient, the Munich-based company behind MyTherapy, sees a lot of potential in the new features: “we know that many patients want to think about their treatment as little as possible. For these people, MyTherapy’s integration of Siri Shortcuts can be the decisive bit of non-intrusive convenience that keeps them from missing a potentially life-saving dose.”
Support for Siri Shortcuts is also a big step in the right direction when it comes to one of the MyTherapy team’s key objectives: developing a truly accessible app.
“Many people living with chronic diseases have to deal with visual impairments. MyTherapy is already accessible to blind and visually-impaired users thanks to support for frameworks such as Apple Voiceover and Android’s Talkback,” explains Gaede, “but we believe Siri Shortcuts has the potential to take accessibility to another level.”
About MyTherapy
Keep track of your medications and stay on top of your health. The award-winning MyTherapy app reminds you of the medications you need to take and to get active by tracking your vitals and symptoms. MyTherapy’s built-in health journal summarises your medication and health information so you can oversee your health progress. You can share this information with your healthcare providers, helping them better understand your needs. You can also let your family be your safety net in case you do forget a dose. MyTherapy keeps you in charge of your personal data at all times with certified data security and strict privacy policies prohibiting the distribution to third parties. MyTherapy’s proven impact on medication adherence and its outstanding ease of usability for patients of all age groups has been demonstrated by several studies with reputable research institutes including Germany’s largest university hospital Charité Berlin. MyTherapy is available free of charge from the iTunes App Store and on Google Play.
For more information please visit: www.mytherapyapp.com
