Apple announced ResearchKit, an open-source software framework built for medical and health research that helps doctors and scientists collect participant data more frequently and accurately using iPhone apps. Global research institutions have already developed apps with ResearchKit for studies on asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson's disease. Users decide whether to participate in a study and how their data will be shared.
“iOS apps already help millions of people track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by enabling people to participate in and contribute to medical research," said Jeff Williams, Apple's vice president of operations. . "ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse global population and more ways than ever to collect data."
ResearchKit turns iPhone into a medical research tool. When the user gives permission, apps can access data in the Health app, such as weight, blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and asthma inhaler usage, which are measured by third-party devices and apps. HealthKit is a software framework that Apple released with iOS 8 to give developers the ability to develop health and fitness apps that communicate. ResearchKit may also require a user to give access to accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope and GPS sensors to receive information about gait, motor impairment, fitness, speech and memory.
ResearchKit also makes it easier to recruit patients for large-scale studies by accessing a large population sample, not just people in an institution's area. Study participants can complete assignments or submit surveys right from the app, so researchers spend less time on documentation to focus on data analysis. ResearchKit also lets researchers introduce an interactive informed consent process. Users choose which studies they want to participate in and the data they want to provide in each study.
“Access to more diverse health data provided by patients will help us learn more about the long-term effects of cancer treatments and give a better understanding of the experience of breast cancer patients,” said Patricia Ganz, professor at the School of Health. Public Fielding of UCLA and director of cancer prevention and control research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.
“In terms of research to improve diagnosis and disease prevention, numbers are crucial. With Apple's new ResearchKit framework, we can extend participation beyond our local community and collect much more data to help us understand how asthma works," said Eric Schadt, PhD, professor of genomics at the College of Icahn Medicine at Mount Sinai and founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.
ResearchKit will be released as an open source framework in April, giving researchers the ability to contribute specific activity modules to the framework, such as memory or gait testing, and share these modules with the global research community, to further increase the our knowledge of this disease. For more information access www.apple.com/researchkit.
EXAMPLES OF APPS CREATED WITH APPLE RESEARCHKIT
Developed by the Icahn College of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, the Asthma Health app was created to facilitate the education and personal monitoring of patients with asthma, promote positive behavioral change, and reinforce adherence to treatment plans in line with current asthma guidelines. The study tracks patterns of symptoms in each patient and what triggers the disease to get worse, so researchers can learn new ways to personalize asthma treatment.
O Share the Journey app, developed by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Penn Medicine, Sage Bionetworks and UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, is a research study to understand why some breast cancer survivors recover faster than others, why symptoms vary over time and what can be done to improve symptoms. This app will use data from surveys and iPhone sensors to collect and track fatigue, mood and cognitive changes, sleep disturbances and reduced exercise.
Developed by Stanford Medicine, the MyHeart Counts app measures activity and uses information about risk factors and studies to help researchers more accurately assess how a participant's activity and lifestyle are related to cardiovascular health. By studying these relationships on a large scale, researchers will be able to better understand how to keep the heart healthier.
Massachusetts General Hospital developed the GlucoSuccess app to understand how various aspects of a person's life—diet, physical activity, and medications—affect blood glucose levels. The app can also help participants identify how food and activity choices are related to better blood glucose levels, allowing them to clearly see the correlations and take a proactive stance towards their own well-being.
Developed by Sage Bionetworks and the University of Rochester, the Parkinson mPower app helps Parkinson's disease patients track their symptoms by using iPhone sensors to record activities including memory games, manual dexterity testing, talking and walking. Phone activity and survey data are combined with data from many other participants to fuel Parkinson's research on a scale never before possible, making this the largest and most comprehensive study of this disease worldwide.
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