Thousands Volunteer For Apple ResearchKit Medical Research
By Katie Wike, contributing writer
Apple’s program that will allow iPhone users to consent to medical research has already seen thousands volunteer to share data.
Thousands of people have signed up to share data in the name of medical research through Apple’s latest innovation, the Apple ResearchKit. According to iHealth Beat, the software platform allows researchers to collect data from consenting iPhone users. It gives researchers access to tools like iPhones accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS and microphone.
“iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations in an announcement on March 9. “ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
Modern Healthcare reports that, although the possibilities sound endless, some have reservations about culling information from smartphone users. Ethicists like Art Caplan, founding director at NYU Langone Medical Center's population health department say that when manufacturers make this jump they need to remember they are dealing with human subjects, “They're not dealing with just consumers anymore."
iPhone users, however, seem to have no such reservations, as 11,000 users had already signed up to participate in a cardiovascular study just one day after Apple made the ResearchKit announcement.
“When it comes to researching how we can better diagnose and prevent disease, numbers are everything. By using Apple’s new ResearchKit framework, we’re able to extend participation beyond our local community and capture significantly more data to help us understand how asthma works,” said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. “Using iPhone’s advanced sensors, we’re able to better model an asthma patient’s condition to enable us to deliver a more personalized, more precise treatment.”