Apple wants to make contributing to medical research as easy as installing an app on your iPhone.
One of the overlooked components of the company’s press event on Monday was the introduction of ResearchKit, a new framework that lets developers turn the iPhone into a medical research machine. Greg Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations, said that the tools should give researchers access to a larger cohort of study participants, along with more reliable data.
There are five new ResearchKit-powered apps in the App Store right now that people can download, install and use, assuming they meet the eligibility requirements. MyHeart Counts is the most permissive in that regard, allowing anyone who can read English and who resides in the U.S. to contribute to research on cardiovascular health. Other apps allow users to contribute to research on type two diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, breast cancer and asthma.
Apple has lined up a laundry list of high-profile institutions to conduct research using ResearchKit, including Stanford Hospital, the University of Rochester and Mount Sinai Hospital. All of the research is done by those partner institutions, and uses data collected from users through surveys as well as from health metrics gathered in Apple’s Health app using the iPhone’s sensors. Users are in full control of what information they share with researchers, and Apple doesn’t get access to any of the information shared using ResearchKit. (Depending on the study, it’s possible that anonymized user data could get shared with other researchers.)
Moving forward, ResearchKit-powered apps may make their way onto other mobile platforms. Williams said that the framework will be made open source so that other institutions can use it to develop across platforms.
