Apple is donating a thousand Apple Watches to a binge eating study. The University of North Carolina’s medical school is starting a study called BEGIN (via CNBC).
Binge Eating Study
BEGIN stands for Binge Eating Genetics Initiative. Researchers want to understand overeating better, and Apple Watches could help. The team hopes to recruit 1,000 people ages 18 and older who have experienced binge eating disorder or bulimia nervosa. After enrollment, participants can sign up with a mobile app called Recovery Record.
Each participant will be given a free watch, courtesy of Apple, and researchers will monitor their heart rate using the device’s sensor over the course of a month to see if there are spikes before binge eating episodes. It’s likely that a binging and purging episode would cause some biological change that would show up in the Apple Watch data, according to Bulik.
The data could give insight into prediction of binge eating incidents before they happen.