Apple's gateway to future healthcare: ResearchKit

In addition to the details of the Apple Watch release and the release of the new Macbook, Apple also brought a new medical project, ResearchKit, at the press conference on the early morning of March 10. Simply put, ResearchKit is Apple's software infrastructure for medical researchers. It is a further step towards personal health monitoring iHealth, through the establishment of a strong database in the world's top medical institutions for further medical research and treatment.

According to Apple, patients can use the iPhone to perform basic detection and recording of diseases including Parkinson's syndrome through simple detection, including recording your gait and balance, and sharing relevant data through related apps to promote the Disease research.

At the press conference, Apple COO Jeff Williams explained the original intention of launching ResearchKit: At present, medical research still has several limitations. First, participants are difficult to recruit, medical research often requires a large number of volunteers to participate; second, survey data is subjective. The third is that data is released very frequently. In order to solve these problems, Apple's idea is: There are already 700 million iPhones sold worldwide, and each iPhone is a smart hardware that can record user health information. Why not use this huge user group to let patients and researchers share Participate in medical research?

Indeed, collecting patient data is one of the biggest challenges in medical research. For example, when an expert studies the mechanism of heart disease formation, he hopes to obtain the largest case data, but traditional medical research projects generally take many years to collect thousands of cases, and the project is very difficult.

But collecting data happens to be one of the main features of ResearchKit. With ResearchKit, Apple can turn thousands of iPhones into tools for medical research. With this tool, medical researchers can quickly and extensively collect patient data from around the world.

According to the ResearchKit technical documentation, in terms of data collection, it has preset templates for five task types, including gait, tapping, 6-minute walk, spatial memory, and vocalization. In addition, Apple encourages developers to create more new models to absorb data and share it with the community. And because ResearchKit and HealthKit are open, it means researchers can get more intuitive data like steps, calories, and heartbeats.

All ResearchKit applications use questionnaires and mobile data collection methods to obtain disease data. For example, the mPower software for studying Parkinson's Syndrome uses the iPhone's touch screen to collect information on hand tremors and uses microphones to collect sound jitter data.

ResearchKit provides medical researchers with a new access to patient data. However, the data obtained through this channel will be affected by two aspects in terms of accuracy.

On the one hand, because the iPhone is positioned in the high-end market, its user base is relatively young and affluent. Therefore, the data obtained through this channel will inevitably have a certain sample bias. On the other hand, medical research requires very high accuracy in collecting data, which poses a challenge to the accuracy of data collection for smart terminal devices such as the iPhone or Apple Watch.

Despite this, there are still many medical experts who are optimistic about the future of ResearchKit. According to Mitesh Patel, a health research expert at the University of Pennsylvania, "Despite the limitations of ResearchKit, the use of medical apps can lead to improvements in medical research, and mobile APP will be the future of medical and pharmaceutical research in the future."

It can be said that ResearchKit will have unlimited potential in the future medical field. For Apple, ResearchKit is an in-depth expansion of its layout medical industry , and it will also be an opportunity to change the medical industry.

Last June, Apple has launched HealthKit's initial layout of the medical industry. It is understood that there are currently more than 10 top medical companies in the United States to launch the HealthKit service pilot project to establish a patient health information database for the hospital. At the same time, more than 600 developers have integrated HealthKit into their health and fitness applications.

HealthKit is just a healthy data platform for ordinary users and medical institutions and developers. ResearchKit is more profound, it really launches the mobile medical mechanism, and the core role in this process is "doctor", "medical researcher", through the mobile app can really solve patient-related problems or Propose a treatment plan that will touch the “pain point” of the mobile medical industry.

And, all this is not just at the stage of conception.

Currently, Apple is working with some leading hospitals to jointly develop and test ResearchKit, and first launched five applications for different conditions, including Parkinson's disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, breast cancer and so on. From next month, the ResearchKit tool will be fully open to third-party developers, and developers will be able to use this interface to develop more apps for various diseases.

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