Why ResearchKit Is the Most Exciting Thing Apple Announced Yesterday
Apple announced a few things yesterday , but ResearchKit, the company’s new platform for medical research and healthcare, is clearly the technology with the greatest potential to actually improve people’s lives. Similar services are already in operation around the world to help doctors and patients manage symptoms and improve health. This is why it matters and how it can actually make a difference in healthcare.
At a press conference dominated by new consumer gadgets like the Apple Watch and the new MacBook, Apple’s ResearchKit stood out like a sore thumb. The platform aims to empower anyone with an iOS device to participate in medical research, join programs that can help them track their symptoms, or share information with their doctors. As with any new technology, it will take some time to develop, but the end applications – and some of them are already in development – can really help people.
Quantified self-esteem works best when someone qualified verifies the data
“Quantifying yourself” is the idea that the key to improving your life is keeping track of everything you do and using that information to identify patterns and make positive changes. For many of us, this means tracking steps, recording food and exercise, and even tracking sleep. Of course, not all of the data we receive from these trackers is reliable , and the information we see is even more difficult to interpret if you’re not sure what you see or how it affects your overall health picture.
This is where ResearchKit can help. When you connect your phone to healthcare facilities and research organizations, the information you log, the steps you take, and the trials you participate in all come back to the people who developed them – presumably doctors and researchers who can (and aspire to) analyze the information you provide. Since doctors are specifically familiar with such tools, they can provide tests and tools that will allow you to record your meals, steps and activity, and help you understand exactly why you are taking 10,000 steps a day, but not losing weight or sleeping. eight hours a day, but still has difficulty staying awake during the day.
In short, we can track our own activity as much as we want, but if we are not knowledgeable enough to look at the big picture and understand what we see (as well as identify outliers and see trends in the data), we “we are just spinning our wheels. If ResearchKit can build a bridge between this information and the people most qualified to study it and provide feedback, the potential health implications at the individual level are enormous.
Where Technologies Like ResearchKit Are Already Used
Apple’s approach here is interesting because it turns devices that millions of people already own into tools that can improve their health. However, many research institutes have been using technologies such as ResearchKit for many years for their own trials and experiments. For example, Propeller Health, based in Madison, Wisconsin, has worked with hospitals and public health agencies for yearsto help patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) manage their symptoms, track their movements, and record their seizures and timing. their offensive. take medication and pass all this information on to your doctor.
In a pilot program in Louisville, Kentucky, asthma sufferers were given GPS and Bluetooth-connected rescue inhalers and asked to conduct their daily lives as usual. Every time they used their inhaler, the device installed on it recorded the position of the person, sent it to his smartphone, and his smartphone recorded the event where he was, the time of day and some other useful information about the time. the place and duration of the attack. The impact of the study was immediate.
For one patient, her doctors were able to view data collected by her inhaler and smartphone and quickly noted that she had occasional asthma attacks while walking in a park near her office during her lunch break. At first, doctors assumed she was allergic to something in the park, but upon closer examination and testing, her notes showed that this was not the case – there were no unusual plants or animals in the park that would be unusual near her home. By cross-referencing where she had attacks with the time of day, as well as wind and weather data from weather stations in the same city, the researchers were able to determine that it was a chicken farm a few miles downwind of the park and the higher height was to blame. On the days she reported seizures, the wind blew from the farm, bringing with it the allergens that likely triggered her seizures. Without the real-time tracking platform they used to collect this information, they probably would never have been able to piece it all together.
The entire experiment was covered in this old NHK World documentary , and you can read more about how the platform works in this article on TheBlaze , but the impact of the experiment went far beyond the health of one woman (although, in all honesty, that would have been enough If it were All that was.) The pilot program here drew hundreds of participants, all using the same internet-connected health tracking software in the same city. The city’s public health administration was able to partner with a local research hospital to track asthma cases and attacks throughout the city, with the ultimate goal of improving air quality and – in the long term – reducing the number of asthma sufferers in their community.
How ResearchKit Can Make Big Health Data A Reality Everywhere
Apple ResearchKit offers companies like Propeller Health and municipalities like Louisville a common platform to conduct such experiments and public tests – all without having to first reinvent the wheel yourself. In the future, similar programs may appear around the world with lower start-up costs and less deployment time. Best of all, every iOS device in the wild will already be compatible with the tools researchers choose, your doctor may someday hand you a wearable device, advise you to download the ResearchKit app and come back for it. reappointment in a few months, after he has collected enough information to diagnose your condition.
But what about privacy and security? We’ve established that many medical companies sell your data , but yesterday Apple went out of its way to state that Apple never sees the data you provide through ResearchKit – which is a good thing, given that most of it will be used for either medical research. … , study or individual patient care. However, with whom research institutions, hospitals and doctors share this data is up to them (although still governed by laws such as HIPAA ).
Similarly, Apple announced yesterday that ResearchKit will be open source. This presumably means that security researchers will be able to pull and push it from the outside, make sure leaks and holes are plugged, vulnerabilities are discovered, and the applications that are built to do this are equally safe (or at least can open source doesn’t make me believe we’ll be seeing ResearchKit on non-Apple or iOS devices anytime soon (so expect Google and Microsoft to contribute to this area soon), but it does mean that developers, nonprofits and cash-strapped healthcare professionals who really want to help people can get involved and do just that.
Where HealthKit Goes Trick, ResearchKit Can Really Help People
Apple’sHealthKitworks in the same vein as most other fitness trackers and apps. It will track your level of activity, evaluate your burned calories, help you keep track of your diet – everything that you are already used to. This is all great, but we found that an information dump does not mean better health . Don’t confuse this with ResearchKit. ResearchKit, on the other hand, by simply giving your data to people who can actually use it to help you (and helping others) and offering those same people a platform to build better tools already has real promise.
As we mentioned above, doctors and hospitals are already using it for asthma. In Apple’s announcement yesterday, we saw the ResearchKit app designed to help people with Parkinson’s measure agility, balance, and dexterity. There is another app designed to help diabetes patients manage their condition, one to help people assess their risk of heart disease, and another to help breast cancer patients track their post-treatment experiences. Can’t wait to see what’s next.