As if HealthKit weren’t good enough already, Apple is making a move that looks pretty darn selfless, using its weight to do some potentially-massive public good.
It arrives in the form of a new app-development framework, called ResearchKit and it’s aimed at getting researchers & docs closer to their goals through more & better data.
As Kathryn Schmitz describes in the video above, study reserchers may send out tens of thousands of solicitaiton letters, only to get near 1/2 of one percent in actual responses.
So, what if apps containing simple diagnostic inputs with rich storage & filtering abilities could be sent out to the Hundreds of Millions of iPhone users?
Add to that the increasing-number of cheap, simple diagnostic widgets people are inventing for the iPhone, ponentially even for blood-testing one day.
And, looking-forward, what if an Apple Watch, or something even cheaper & more health-specific could pair with that iPhone & send an almost constant stream of data back to the researchers?
Yes. You would need some really big server-farms to store all of it.
But maybe the increase in reporting, and the subsequent analytics that could be applied to it, would eventually lead to some pretty staggering breakthroughs in treatment, quality-of-life, or even… -Cure?
Well, that’s what Apple started with their medical partners.
The first 5 apps have been built in cooperation with some pretty high-profile partners and they focus on Asthma, Parkinson’s, Diabetes, Breast Cancer, and Heart Disease. They will join the existing 900 apps already written for the larger HealthKit platform.
And the best part? ResearchKit is Open Source and anyone can build & distribute their own custom apps on the platform.
TeleMedicine, here we come!
Check out the rest of the details at the Links:
Photo/Video Credits: HealthKit video segment from “Spring Forward” event, and HealthKit stack icon, by Apple
Links:
• Source: Apple ResearchKit
[Upd: if finicky embed chooses not to load properly, the video is here.]
• More Coverage: Asthma Health [appstore link] | mPower for Parkinson’s [appstore link] | GlucoSuccess for Diabetes [appstore link] | Share The Journey for Breast Cancer [appstore link] | MyHeart Counts for Cardiovascular [appstore link] | ResearchKit For Developers
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