{"id":7432,"date":"2018-03-26T11:32:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-26T15:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/apple-researchkit-crowdsourcing-medical-research\/"},"modified":"2018-03-26T17:40:51","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T21:40:51","slug":"apple-researchkit-crowdsourcing-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/apple-researchkit-crowdsourcing-medical-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple ResearchKit \u2013 Crowdsourcing Medical Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen you have large number of people participating in research, your insights into the condition, increase exponentially. With ResearchKit, we\u2019re getting day by day assessments on how people are doing,\u201d<\/i> Ray Dorse, MD, MBA, University of Rochester Medical Center.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Gist
\n<\/b>Apple\u2019s ResearchKit was launched in March 2015 with the goal to improve medical research, most definitely an aspirational and inspiring goal. In the last 3 years medical research studies have been initiated by for profit companies, nonprofits organizations and medical centers, with almost 20 in its first year, (see attached for examples studies launched in 2016). The medical community weighed in and laid out two general potential outcomes from the consumer electronics company move: 1) Enable better insights into medical conditions 2) Allow increased personalization and better care to patients.<\/p>\n

\"ResearchKit<\/a>
ResearchKit Apps Studies Launched in 2016<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Wait, What Is It?
\n<\/b>ResearchKit is an open source framework, which is meant to allow researchers and developers to create apps, much like for the Appstore, but geared around furthering the cause of their medical research. Apple has built into the framework ready made modules that the community could build from. These apps will enjoy access to patients vitals, (i.e. heart rate, steps, calorie use etc), which are already constantly being acquired by Apple, (dubbed HealthKit).<\/p>\n

Apple Platform Playbook?
\n<\/b>Interestingly, this could be called a another \u201cPlatform move\u201d by the CA based tech giant. This isn\u2019t a launch of a single app or dozens of apps. This isn\u2019t a Pharma company giving out sensors based medical hardware to improve their clinical trials. This isn\u2019t a 3rd<\/sup> party app launched on Apple\u2019s Appstore accessing vitals via the phone. This is a play, in which Apple lays out the infrastructure, coupled with ready-made parts and tutorials, in the hopes that a community will adopt it and flourish.<\/p>\n

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ELMo, a platform that allows parents to capture video recordings of their child’s speech-language at home with their iPhone or iPad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ok, But Why Apple?
\n<\/b>Despite being characterized as an over simplified framework simply adding UI sugar to researchers\u2019 studies, many believe it is an easy to use and painless solution to actually distribute health research via enabled apps. I believe there are a few reasons why Apple was and is well positioned to lead a sizable impact on this space:<\/p>\n