Lost amid the fanfare of the Apple Watch and the new MacBook is Apple's ResearchKit, a software platform that will allow medical researchers to develop apps for the iPhone to help them collect data from their studies.
Furthermore, ResearchKit will allow the researchers to recruit participants without requiring the people to set foot in their laboratories, a capability that may prove to be a great boon to medical research as recruiting subjects is one of the hardest parts of any study.
During its March 9 event, Apple presented five new ResearchKit apps that were developed by Apple and various researchers. According to Apple, the open-access software for ResearchKit will be released next month, which would allow medical researchers to develop apps according to the needs of their studies.
ResearchKit will hopefully lead to more data, which could possibly lead to more discoveries that could aid people suffering from certain medical issues. In addition, tapping into the user base of iPhones presents a very diverse audience compared to who usually participates in medical research studies.
The first five apps are developed for researchers that are studying asthma, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. Most of the functionalities of the apps revolve around tracking the daily lives of participants by the researchers, with the aim of detecting patterns that could lead to better practices for managing the targeted diseases.
User engagement also currently seems to be at a high level of interest.
"After six hours we have 7406 people enrolled in our Parkinson's study. Largest one ever before was 1700 people. #ResearchKit," tweeted John Wilbanks, the Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetwork that worked on the mPower app for Parkinson's disease.
While the research apps are simple to download and tap into the massive Apple audience, there are also some ethical questions raised by the implementation of ResearchKit.
Both Apple and the researchers using ResearchKit will have to go to extra lengths to ensure that the participants signing up for the studies are eligible, that the subjects know about any risks involved, and that the data being collected will be kept secure.
One of the major hurdles regarding ResearchKit is that over 60 percent of teenagers in America own an iPhone, and it is not allowed for minors to participate in medical research studies without the consent of their parents. However, it is easy for users to lie about their age, and even if they are really affected by a certain disease or not, when signing up to be a participant in a study through ResearchKit, with such instances possibly tainting the collected data if not caught.
As such, crowdsourced medical data cannot be exactly considered as high-quality research data, especially without implementing procedures to ensure that the collected data is accurate and reliable.
However, probably the most important thing about Apple's ResearchKit is that the toolkit, despite all the ethical issues and procedural problems that are currently associated with it, represents a new direction for medical research. Whether the new direction is successful or not, only time will tell.
