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 The ResearchKit software tool, an open source platform, allows
researchers to design applications that use built-in sensors on the
iPhone along with data from other wearable devices to gather
real-time health data. Scientists from Stanford University School of
Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College are among the first to
offer apps for diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
For example, Massachusetts General Hospital's GlucoSuccess app
allows diabetics to participate in a research study that gives
feedback on how their diet and exercise patterns impact daily
glucose readings. It asks volunteers whether they have taken all of
their medications or inspected their feet.
"It's very hard in practice for people to carry out all the
recommendations and stick with them over time," said Dr. Stanley
Shaw, co-director of the Center for Assessment Technology and
Continuous Health at Massachusetts General.
Other apps released on Monday involve studies on asthma, breast
cancer and Parkinson’s disease. For volunteers, the apps are
designed to help people with chronic disease follow through with
important health behaviors.
For researchers, the data improves upon the many pages of survey
questions study volunteers had to fill out, often based on their
recollection of what they ate in the prior week or how many minutes
they put in at the gym.
Shaw said the fact that Apple made ResearchKit open source will
allow "a whole host of medical researchers" to develop apps for
their own research projects.
"We view this as the opening salvo," he said.
The MyHeart Counts app will collect data about physical activity and
cardiac risk factors for Stanford scientists studying heart disease.
It allows users to complete tasks, such as performing a six-minute
walk if they are able, and answer surveys from their iPhone, and
provide them with an assessment of their heart health and
information on how to improve it.
The app can tap into data gathered by other wearable gadgets such as
Jawbone or Fitbit, but it can also be used with the iPhone, as long
as people remember to keep their phones turned on, said Dr. Euan
Ashley, chair of Stanford's biomedical data science initiative.
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Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health,
sees mobile health playing a major role in the president's $215
million precision medicine initiative.
He anticipates tech companies will use large patient studies as a
"test bed for a lot of the technologies they are developing."
"The Googles and the Apples and the Qualcomms are certainly paying
close attention to the potential of this," Collins said in a recent
interview with Reuters.
Researchers say ResearchKit simplifies their recruiting work.
Volunteers can decide how much data to share directly with the
research institutions. "The data does not go to Apple," Ashley said.
Dr. Eric Schadt, a genomics professor at the Icahn School of
Medicine at New York's Mount Sinai, used the platform to develop an
asthma app along with Weill Cornell Medical College and LifeMap
Solutions, a subsidiary of BioTime.
The fact that researchers can recruit, consent and enroll
participants remotely should produce study sample sizes that are
"orders of magnitude" greater than in the past at a fraction of the
cost, Schadt said.
(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Bernard Orr)
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