The iPhone app not only benefits users, it’s designed to help people world over and contribute to medical research and studies.
The introduction of Apple’s Research Kit this year got tons of people to sign up for medical research, the initiative got thousands of volunteers to sign up within a day of the launch. According to the research studies that have been carried out lately, a large amount of data collection and information have been carried out recently covering many aspects of the research studies that are carried out in patients.
Dr. Eric Schadt, from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, explained, "Traditional research has been constrained to informing potential participants about a study, the risks, the benefits and so on, by sitting directly with the participant (or on the phone) to step them through the paperwork and other material to complete the informed consent."
Dr. Eric has been involved with the app related to Asthma, which previews that symptoms in areas that could trigger the effect reports that on the first day only of the launch of the iPhone app, around 2,500 downloads of the Asthma app were received. This, however, would generally take researchers around 1-2 years, but within a month the app claimed over 7,500 sign-ups.
Moreover, previously Apple employees, Senior Vice president Operations, Jeff Williams and Bud Tribble covered various aspects of the app, according to latest Apple news.
According to Williams, developing the HealthKit in turn, lead to the idea of ResearchKit. In order to develop the health app, Apple met up with a number of health professionals, constant contact with the medical industry was vital for the development of a fully functional and useful app. According to Williams’s constant exposure to the health industry provided important insight about the concerns of medical professionals; medical professionals themselves were fascinated by the app and claimed that the app could prove to be an important tool for research.
Williams laid increased emphasis on the importance of the ResearchKit for the medical industry as well as the patients; the ResearchKit is designed to keep the patients engaged in bringing about improvements in their health. He added that Apple foresees, “huge opportunities with hundreds of millions of iPhones users,”
Apple is fully devoted to the cause, which is why they’ve kept ResearchKit open source unlike other Apple products; this way researchers can continue contributing towards the improvement of the product, thus ensuring a superior impact.
The open source platform that was released in April was made available on the app store; the applications cover Parkinson’s disease, Asthma, Breast Cancer, Cardiovascular Diseases and Diabetes. Given the gigantic army of iPhone users spread out the world over, Researchkit will be a game changer when it comes to medical research and the number of people participating in research studies. According to Stanford University.
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