Apple's been making it clear for a few years now that it's heavily invested in the health side of its technology platforms. It's been pushing the health features of its Apple Watch for a while, and Apple Health is a useful system even if you're not tracking metrics with a wearable.

It's also been participating in and funding health studies for some time, again especially using the Apple Watch to measure a range of factors, and another major study in this line has just launched in partnership with UCLA

It'll look into how physical activity, heart rate, sleep and more play into the occurence and nature of depression and anxiety among participants, using Apple Watches, iPhones and Beddit trackers to measure these elements. 

150 participants have apparently been recruited already for the first phase of the study, which will eventually expand out to 3,000 participants giving it a greater sense of scale. 

The study will be completely remote due to the health situation that's still very much ongoing, and each participant will receive all three bits of hardware to ensure they can track everything as is needed. 

This is an exciting prospect, but given the length of the study we shouldn't expect to hear too much from it for quite some time. The anonymised data will be studied throughout, but latter phases will run into 2023, so this is one for the long haul.