ResearchKit - page 2

Apple’s unveiling of ResearchKit was one of the biggest surprises at event in March. The software framework is designed to help doctors and scientists with medical and health research, and starting today, Apple is opening up ResearchKit to everyone.

The first five ResearchKit apps that study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease already enrolled over 60,000 iPhone users in the first few weeks. Now medical researchers all over the world will be able to tap into the same software that researchers at Stanford and Oxford University used to develop their medical apps.

Apple’s new open source platform, ResearchKit, could change our lives more than Apple Watch, and according to a report from Fusion detailing the inside story of ResearchKit, Apple may have got some outside inspiration for the project.

A lecture given by renowned medical researcher Dr. Stephen Friend was possibly the driving force behind Apple’s push into the industry. During a presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Friend asked attendees to imagine a future where researchers could run ten trials, with several thousand patients.

“Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries,” Friend told the crowd, completely unaware that Apple’s newly appointed VP for medical technologies, Mike O’Reilly, was among those catching Friend’s vision for a medical research utopia.

“I can’t tell you where I work, and I can’t tell you what I do, but I need to talk to you,” O’Reilly told Friend after his presentation.

You can keep your new ultra-thin MacBook and your high-priced Apple Watch; for me, the most exciting thing at Monday’s “Spring Forward” Apple keynote was the announcement of ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS framework that essentially turns your sensor-filled iPhone into a crowdsourcing medical diagnostic device.

The idea is that researchers will be able to tap into Apple’s enormous base of iPhone users to gather medical data. Users simply sign up to participate in huge global studies about diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, letting researchers build up giant data sets in a fraction of the amount of time it would normally take. Think Kickstarter for medicine!

And according to Bloomberg, initial reports are really, really positive.

Aside from the gorgeous new 12-inch MacBook Air, the part of today’s Apple keynote that excited me the most was the announcement of what Apple is calling ResearchKit, a new open-source iOS software framework designed to crowdsource volunteers for medical research studies.

Using the tool, researchers can tap into Apple’s massive iPhone user base to recruit people for medical data-gathering. Users sign up with a digital signature, and can then instantly begin recording data.

The biggest surprise about today’s big Apple Watch event? That Cupertino’s upcoming wearable didn’t really steal the show.

We got a few new details about the smartwatch, but Tim Cook and crew really blew our minds with several other big announcements. Here are the most important revelations from the show at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.