At Apple‘s “˜Spring Forward‘ event yesterday, the company announced that they are taking a step in an all new direction, one that they haven‘t been involved in yet – medical research.
While Apple has had their fingers in almost every pie over the last few years, the medical field is something they have only briefly touched on with last year‘s launch of HealthKit. Yesterday, however, the tech giant revealed plans to help medical researchers find so-called “˜test subjects‘ easier – thus helping the medical world to do their research more efficiently.
ResearchKit is an all new software platform that is aimed at helping medical institutions do more thorough research by collecting medical data from iPhone users.
The platform integrates with Apple‘s existing HealthKit tool to essentially turn your iPhone into a tool that will provide medical researchers with informative diagnostics.
ResearchKit will allow any iPhone user to contribute to medical research in various fields and with specific diseases.
Apple has partnered with various high-profile medical research institutes, universities and hospitals to track and evaluate the data collected by ResearchKit.
These include Oxford University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, Stanford Medicine, The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and many more.
Not too much detail was revealed on the specifics of how ResearchKit will work, but, in a nutshell, users who sign up to ResearchKit will be able to send data – which is collected through HealthKit of course – to the various medical research institutions that have partnered with Apple.
The data set to these institutions will include things such as blood pressure, glucose levels, weight and exercise habits.
Apple also revealed that they have disease specific apps – some of which have been released already – that can track specific things related to that particular disease.
For example, there is an app that tracks Parkinson‘s Disease symptoms and an app that tracks people with asthma, i.e how many times they use their inhaler each day.
ResearchKit is not yet available, but will be officially released next month as an open source platform.
It‘s great to see a company like Apple lend a helping hand to medical researchers across the globe. Considering how many iPhone users there are worldwide, these researchers will have quite the pile of people to work off of.
Source: The Verge
