During Apple’s most recent event, the company launched a new health offering — arguably its most clinically-focused yet — called ResearchKit. The open source platform helps researchers build medical apps and more easily recruit patients for clinical trials and other research projects.
“iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health,”Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations said in a statement. “With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research. ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
With the patient’s permission, researchers can collect certain data points, for example weight, blood pressure, glucose levels, and asthma inhaler use, from HealthKit. HealthKit is a health platform from Apple that launched in September and syncs data from third party apps and devices to a user-facing app called Health. Depending on the data needed for the study, researchers can also use the ResearchKit platform to request access to the smartphone’s accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope, and GPS sensors. These sensors could help in studies looking at, for example, a patient’s gait, motor impairment, fitness, speech, and memory.
Already, Apple has partnered with several big name medical institutions to launch five apps that address: asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. These apps are supported on the iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and the latest generation of iPod touch.
Here are the first five apps using Apple’s ResearchKit platform: Keep reading>>













