8 ms·

ResearchKit: A software framework designed to benefit medical research

348 points by brbcoding 12y ago

ThomPete 12y ago
This to me if it's even close to the promise it has is the real news of that event. The Watch will of course help the data collection.
mhomde 12y ago
Open Source, wow that was unexpected from Apple
- duaneb 12y ago
  It's calculated. Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source—here, the utility is in the transparency as well as apple's traditional offers of usability and reliability.
  - mbreese 12y ago
    Plus, these are all academic partners - that code usually needs to be open source to publish.
    - streptomycin 12y ago
      It's not "usually". More like "rarely". Papers without code are very common.
  - Osmium 12y ago
    > Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source I don't know about that. HealthKit is essentially closed and no one seems to mind, and it's all about the data ultimately anyway. Maybe it's a regulatory thing? Regardless, it's nice to see.
    - duaneb 12y ago
      HealthKit is a glorified database. Would definitely like to see it open sourced, though.
      - antris 12y ago
        Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Seems to apply for almost anything. Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter and so on... It's all about putting in and getting data from a database
        duaneb 12y ago
        > Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Apps, sure. Tools? Hell no. File processors, browsers, libraries.... But HealthKit adds virtually no value aside from the schema of health data. There's not much to be gained from opening it. Honestly, I'd argue the same about hacker news and reddit: it's great that reddit is open source, but it's hardly necessary for me to perform research on it because the semantics of loading/storing/existing are so well defined.
        __david__ 12y ago
        HealthKit is not an app.
  - a_c_s 12y ago
    What's the point about speculating about motivation? Whether motivated by altruism or calculated strategy, who cares? These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary.
    - duaneb 12y ago
      > These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary. True. However, occasionally (I at least) learn something new from these conversations.
  - dataker 12y ago
    Related paper: http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=502415&cf=47 http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=502415&cf=...
- epistasis 12y ago
  Why would that be unexpected? Apple does plenty of things open source, just not GPL.
  - pionar 12y ago
    Apple usually only does things open source when it's required of them. I can't think of one piece of useful Apple open source software that's open.
    - adamcw 12y ago
      I'd consider Webkit pretty useful.
      - tonyarkles 12y ago
        clang too...
      - teamhappy 12y ago
        WebKit has been open sourced 10 years ago. CUPS is even older than that. What has Apple been up to recently? --- You know, you could name projects instead of clicking the upside-down arrow. Clang comes to mind (not LLVM). Google and others contribute heavily to clang, but Apple started it. They deserve credit for that. Anything else?
        bwindels 12y ago
        Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner started LLVM at the University of Illinois in 2000. Only 5 years later, Apple got involved and hired Lattner.
      - nkuttler 12y ago
        Webkit was derived from KHTML, which is LGPL.
        rsynnott 12y ago
- return0 12y ago
  Kind of a no-brainer if universities are going to be involved in building apps for it. Wonder if they announced anything about external addon biosensors?
- mrsteveman1 12y ago
  We'll see how this stuff actually works in practice pretty soon, but as this is more than just a chunk of code to run on a device, what exactly is going to be "open" here? A formal standard that can be implemented and used by other platforms, both on the device and server side, would be great. But Apple's last promise to make something they developed "open" (iMessage as a standard) evaporated and has since been completely proprietary.
  - cududa 12y ago
    No, it was facetime they were going to make an open standard. And patent trolls killed that. So..
- taozhuo 12y ago
  iOS and Mac OS are closed systems with lots of open source components.
- dguaraglia 12y ago
  Open Source in this case might not make much of a difference. If this is written in Swift and only runs under iOS, or if it ties with a certain Apple service that requires certificates issued by Apple it won't make much of a difference if you can read the full source code, even if it's released under an MIT or similarly open license. As long as the data this gathers can't be used (or contributed to) by a third party, it's still a 100% Apple property, regardless of code availability.
aarondf 12y ago
As a Type 1 diabetic, I can't wait to see what happens next. Well done Tim!
joelmbell 12y ago
This is so awesome. If this takes off, medical advancements in the next 10 years are going to be astronomical.
- feld 12y ago
  The FDA has to get more efficient, too
  - seehafer 12y ago
    Beyond being more efficient, they need to have a shift in thinking as to what constitutes a quality SW development process. Example: as of right now, they still think that a waterfall process is the only process that is "correct".
- minthd 12y ago
  I'm not sure. There were several medical crowd sourcing sites, with patients like me quite successful, but only small incremental advances. Not sure if it's because real research needs more than patient symptoms - it also needs objective stuff like blood tests. We'll see.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  Like we are going to find that exercise helps prevent diabetes, heart disease and dementia?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
detaro 12y ago
Summary for those of us who don't have access to a mac right now?
- brbcoding 12y ago
  They are streaming it on twit, that's what I've been using: http://live.twit.tv/ http://live.twit.tv/
- revscat 12y ago
  It is an open-source framework allowing medical researchers and professionals to interact directly with patients via iOS applications. Patients will be able to perform tests, fill out questionnaires, etc., and have the results sent directly to researchers.
mrfusion 12y ago
What is it?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dduugg 12y ago
Great job transitioning from buying Coke using Apple Pay to managing diabetes in ResearchKit. Vertical integration at its finest.
- philip1209 12y ago
  It sounds to me like they're building an internal Truevault for managing patient data.
- stock_toaster 12y ago
  Coke also sells water. Pretty funny though regardless.
  - JustSomeNobody 12y ago
    Of course it does. Carbonated and flavored. :)
    - stock_toaster 12y ago
      Well, they also bottle municipal water and sell it straight up (dasani[1] i think?). I certainly agree that the flavored water, being still sold as "water", is a pretty fucking awful trend though. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_States
  - wahsd 12y ago
    Based on my rough calculations, at a 1,333,333% markup. http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-Bottle-Water/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=240215 http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-...
    - stock_toaster 12y ago
      $2.25 for a million liters of water? Wow, that is crazy. This really exemplifies the age of big-corp we currently live in.
alexbel 12y ago
"Sorry, your browser doesn't support our live video stream" Firefox 36.0
- scarmig 12y ago
  "Sorry, your browser doesn't support our live video stream" Chrome 40.0.2214.115 (64-bit)
- iNate2000 12y ago
  That's the reality-distortion field. It _should_ say, "Sorry, our live video stream doesn't support your browser."
tomkinstinch 12y ago
The page is up for ResearchKit: http://www.apple.com/researchkit/ http://www.apple.com/researchkit/ The Apple Watch would likely be an ideal tool to improve prescription compliance in older patients. Perfect for issuing reminders about time and dosage (and for getting a confirmation that the task has been completed).
- robbiep 12y ago
  They just have to remember to recharge it daily
  - feld 12y ago
    Yeah, this wouldn't work for my dad who has Parkinsons. The watch would be dead and he'd still need reminders for pills...
- dang 12y ago
  Thanks. We changed the url to that from http://www.apple.com/live/2015-mar-event/f407b6b3-5575-4069-87c2-4d3ca949cb2c/ http://www.apple.com/live/2015-mar-event/f407b6b3-5575-4069-....
- drchiu 12y ago
  We've actually already solved this problem pre Apple Watch. It's called Blister Packs, which basically is an arrangement of the medications of when a patient is supposed to take them.
  - tomkinstinch 12y ago
    Blister packs help, but they won't buzz on your wrist at the right time to take the meds (with a text reminder indicating what all of the buzzing is about).
    - wiredfool 12y ago
      Blister packs are great for figuring out which doses you forgot. And that's with nominally functioning adults.
nsxwolf 12y ago
People rich enough to own iPhones is an interesting confounding variable for health studies.
- return0 12y ago
  Not sure how bad that is, though. After all a lot of studies just employ university students
- byw 12y ago
  Though I'd imagine if a study requires the use of these sensors, an Apple Watch may be cheaper than something from a medical device manufacturer.
- iamdanfox 12y ago
  Android compatibility looks feasible since the kit will be open source [1]. That should open up the ResearchKit demographic quite a bit! [1]: https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/ https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/
  - tomovo 12y ago
    Open? Like Facetime was supposed to be?
    - Alphasite_ 12y ago
      Why does this one keep getting trotted out, lets assume unless they get sued we're fine.
    - freshyill 12y ago
      Blame the patent trolls, not Apple for that.
  - sjwright 12y ago
    Not quite so feasible if the kit is written in Swift.
chatmasta 12y ago
This is probably the coolest announcement from the event, at least from the perspective of societal benefits. Medical research faces a real challenge of selection bias. Survey respondents and study participants largely come from two groups: 1) undergrads responding to a campus flyer, and 2) local university-town residents looking to make extra money. Obviously this means respondents are geographically homogenous, and in many cases socioeconomically homogenous as well. Enabling a wider reach for researchers will not only increase sample size, but also eliminate selection bias. This is a very, very good thing. Also, now research isn't limited to only university researchers. I wonder if the plan is to allow participants to earn credits on apple pay.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wahsd 12y ago
  Considering the underwhelming nature of healthkit and the rather rudimentary substantial use-case, I am rather reserved.
- minthd 12y ago
  We've had similar stuff like ResearchKit in existence for quite long. One of the most popular of such sites is patientslikeme.com .It and others did a great job around this, but usage is relatively rare. The hard thing about such sites is:how do you incentivize people to contribute really personal information and do so on a regular basis(even if said action takes a relatively long time) ? So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
  - Osmium 12y ago
    > So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ? A large marketing budget helps, e.g. see the video they launched with. Making it easy to use and frictionless would also help (no need to log into the website, no need to figure out how to sign a PDF or download a consent form or whatever the normal user flow is). What concerns me is people gaming the apps; downloading them and filling them with fake data just to be malicious. You fix one problem and introduce another...
dataker 12y ago
The ultimate example that the cure of X also come from programmers, not solely doctors.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
FrojoS 12y ago
Anyone here who has already experience with it? Apparently a handful of hospitals and universities got early access.
- tomschlick 12y ago
  They would most likely be under strict NDA until the public release.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
voronoff 12y ago
Research works best when the subjects of long term studies can see and react to the data they are generating in real time. Anti-blind trials are the future. /s
dlu 12y ago
This makes gets unreasonably excited. Love that it is open-sourced
fitzwatermellow 12y ago
iTunes links to the first five Apple ResearchKit apps: Asthma Health by Mount Sinai https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/asthma-health-by-mount-sinai/id972625668?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/asthma-health-by-mount-sinai... Share the Journey by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Penn Medicine, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Sage Bionetworks https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/share-the-journey/id972180604?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/share-the-journey/id97218060... Parkinson mPower study app by Sage Bionetworks, University of Rochester, Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972191200&mt=8&ls=1 https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftw... GlucoSuccess by Mass General https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glucosuccess/id972143976?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glucosuccess/id972143976?mt=... My Heart Counts by Stanford Medicine https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myheart-counts/id972189947?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myheart-counts/id972189947?m...
spike021 12y ago
Wasn't FaceTime supposed to be an open-sourced framework/protocol?
- csixty4 12y ago
  That was before VirnetX sued them for $708 million for patent violations, reduced to $368.2 by the judge. To avoid having to license the patents in question, Apple re-architected FaceTime so it's no longer peer-to-peer and instead routes everything through central servers.
albertsun 12y ago
Here's the developer overview: https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/researchkit-technical-overview.pdf https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/researchkit-technica... It appears to mostly be an iOS UI toolkit of sorts for easing the creation of individual apps to collect research data. The hard work must still be done by each individual research project.
cafebeen 12y ago
There's certainly going to be a selection bias, as others have said. I think the most exciting opportunity though is for very fine grained and longitudinal studies.
GoodOldNe 12y ago
As someone about to start a medical residency in the Bay Area who is interested in developing projects to work on a research platform like this, could the HN braintrust recommend a resource for learning the basics of whatever developer tools or frameworks that would be required to work with ResearchKit?
somberi 12y ago
Asking to learn. How is this better an an online polling software - like surveymonkey or polldaddy? From reading the press release, it seems like it is a data collection software from patients. Is there more to it?
- ishansharma 12y ago
  I think the benefit is that the iPhone has sensors that can collect lots of data. For example, the Perkinson's(?) app makes you tap on two targets quickly and say "aaaaa" for long and analyzes the ups and downs in vocal cords using the mic. Patients can't track all this by themselves. Plus, it will automatically send it to researchers. Much easier than making someone enter information on surveymonkey or polldaddy.
jrapdx3 12y ago
Sure, open-source is a good thing. I strongly support OSS and as much as possible run systems at work using FreeBSD, Linux, etc. I've worked in medical practice (and research) for a long time. Considering the vital importance of transactional transparency in carrying out the mission of these fields, as useful as open source is generally, I think the impact in medicine is even greater. But open source is only part of it, open platform is at least as important. I guess I'm not a very trusting soul. Frankly, I don't believe Apple is going to do anything primarily for our good. Rather to my senses the announcement has the flavor of an attempt to gain a toehold or increase market share in the big money research domain. If Apple (or other player) truly wants to generously donate to the public cause, that's wonderful. Then why not support efforts to develop open source, cross-platform apps, assuring all medical research can benefit? Not directed only or in particular at Apple, it's an issue I've raised whenever I have the chance: open source/platform agnostic development can save money and produce more reliable and secure systems.

348 points by brbcoding 12y ago

This to me if it's even close to the promise it has is the real news of that event. The Watch will of course help the data collection.

mhomde 12y ago

Open Source, wow that was unexpected from Apple

duaneb 12y ago
It's calculated. Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source—here, the utility is in the transparency as well as apple's traditional offers of usability and reliability.
- mbreese 12y ago
  Plus, these are all academic partners - that code usually needs to be open source to publish.
  - streptomycin 12y ago
    It's not "usually". More like "rarely". Papers without code are very common.
- Osmium 12y ago
  > Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source I don't know about that. HealthKit is essentially closed and no one seems to mind, and it's all about the data ultimately anyway. Maybe it's a regulatory thing? Regardless, it's nice to see.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    HealthKit is a glorified database. Would definitely like to see it open sourced, though.
    - antris 12y ago
      Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Seems to apply for almost anything. Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter and so on... It's all about putting in and getting data from a database
      - duaneb 12y ago
        > Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Apps, sure. Tools? Hell no. File processors, browsers, libraries.... But HealthKit adds virtually no value aside from the schema of health data. There's not much to be gained from opening it. Honestly, I'd argue the same about hacker news and reddit: it's great that reddit is open source, but it's hardly necessary for me to perform research on it because the semantics of loading/storing/existing are so well defined.
      - __david__ 12y ago
        HealthKit is not an app.
- a_c_s 12y ago
  What's the point about speculating about motivation? Whether motivated by altruism or calculated strategy, who cares? These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    > These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary. True. However, occasionally (I at least) learn something new from these conversations.
- dataker 12y ago
  Related paper: http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=502415&cf=47 http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=502415&cf=...
epistasis 12y ago
Why would that be unexpected? Apple does plenty of things open source, just not GPL.
- pionar 12y ago
  Apple usually only does things open source when it's required of them. I can't think of one piece of useful Apple open source software that's open.
  - adamcw 12y ago
    I'd consider Webkit pretty useful.
    - tonyarkles 12y ago
      clang too...
    - teamhappy 12y ago
      WebKit has been open sourced 10 years ago. CUPS is even older than that. What has Apple been up to recently? --- You know, you could name projects instead of clicking the upside-down arrow. Clang comes to mind (not LLVM). Google and others contribute heavily to clang, but Apple started it. They deserve credit for that. Anything else?
      - bwindels 12y ago
        Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner started LLVM at the University of Illinois in 2000. Only 5 years later, Apple got involved and hired Lattner.
    - nkuttler 12y ago
      Webkit was derived from KHTML, which is LGPL.
      - rsynnott 12y ago
return0 12y ago
Kind of a no-brainer if universities are going to be involved in building apps for it. Wonder if they announced anything about external addon biosensors?
mrsteveman1 12y ago
We'll see how this stuff actually works in practice pretty soon, but as this is more than just a chunk of code to run on a device, what exactly is going to be "open" here? A formal standard that can be implemented and used by other platforms, both on the device and server side, would be great. But Apple's last promise to make something they developed "open" (iMessage as a standard) evaporated and has since been completely proprietary.
- cududa 12y ago
  No, it was facetime they were going to make an open standard. And patent trolls killed that. So..
taozhuo 12y ago
iOS and Mac OS are closed systems with lots of open source components.
dguaraglia 12y ago
Open Source in this case might not make much of a difference. If this is written in Swift and only runs under iOS, or if it ties with a certain Apple service that requires certificates issued by Apple it won't make much of a difference if you can read the full source code, even if it's released under an MIT or similarly open license. As long as the data this gathers can't be used (or contributed to) by a third party, it's still a 100% Apple property, regardless of code availability.

aarondf 12y ago

As a Type 1 diabetic, I can't wait to see what happens next. Well done Tim!

joelmbell 12y ago

This is so awesome. If this takes off, medical advancements in the next 10 years are going to be astronomical.

feld 12y ago
The FDA has to get more efficient, too
- seehafer 12y ago
  Beyond being more efficient, they need to have a shift in thinking as to what constitutes a quality SW development process. Example: as of right now, they still think that a waterfall process is the only process that is "correct".
minthd 12y ago
I'm not sure. There were several medical crowd sourcing sites, with patients like me quite successful, but only small incremental advances. Not sure if it's because real research needs more than patient symptoms - it also needs objective stuff like blood tests. We'll see.
dzhiurgis 12y ago
Like we are going to find that exercise helps prevent diabetes, heart disease and dementia?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

detaro 12y ago

Summary for those of us who don't have access to a mac right now?

brbcoding 12y ago
They are streaming it on twit, that's what I've been using: http://live.twit.tv/ http://live.twit.tv/
revscat 12y ago
It is an open-source framework allowing medical researchers and professionals to interact directly with patients via iOS applications. Patients will be able to perform tests, fill out questionnaires, etc., and have the results sent directly to researchers.

mrfusion 12y ago

What is it?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dduugg 12y ago

Great job transitioning from buying Coke using Apple Pay to managing diabetes in ResearchKit. Vertical integration at its finest.

philip1209 12y ago
It sounds to me like they're building an internal Truevault for managing patient data.
stock_toaster 12y ago
Coke also sells water. Pretty funny though regardless.
- JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Of course it does. Carbonated and flavored. :)
  - stock_toaster 12y ago
    Well, they also bottle municipal water and sell it straight up (dasani[1] i think?). I certainly agree that the flavored water, being still sold as "water", is a pretty fucking awful trend though. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasani#United_States
- wahsd 12y ago
  Based on my rough calculations, at a 1,333,333% markup. http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-Bottle-Water/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=240215 http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-...
  - stock_toaster 12y ago
    $2.25 for a million liters of water? Wow, that is crazy. This really exemplifies the age of big-corp we currently live in.

alexbel 12y ago

"Sorry, your browser doesn't support our live video stream" Firefox 36.0

scarmig 12y ago
"Sorry, your browser doesn't support our live video stream" Chrome 40.0.2214.115 (64-bit)
iNate2000 12y ago
That's the reality-distortion field. It _should_ say, "Sorry, our live video stream doesn't support your browser."

tomkinstinch 12y ago

The page is up for ResearchKit: http://www.apple.com/researchkit/ http://www.apple.com/researchkit/ The Apple Watch would likely be an ideal tool to improve prescription compliance in older patients. Perfect for issuing reminders about time and dosage (and for getting a confirmation that the task has been completed).

robbiep 12y ago
They just have to remember to recharge it daily
- feld 12y ago
  Yeah, this wouldn't work for my dad who has Parkinsons. The watch would be dead and he'd still need reminders for pills...
dang 12y ago
Thanks. We changed the url to that from http://www.apple.com/live/2015-mar-event/f407b6b3-5575-4069-87c2-4d3ca949cb2c/ http://www.apple.com/live/2015-mar-event/f407b6b3-5575-4069-....
drchiu 12y ago
We've actually already solved this problem pre Apple Watch. It's called Blister Packs, which basically is an arrangement of the medications of when a patient is supposed to take them.
- tomkinstinch 12y ago
  Blister packs help, but they won't buzz on your wrist at the right time to take the meds (with a text reminder indicating what all of the buzzing is about).
  - wiredfool 12y ago
    Blister packs are great for figuring out which doses you forgot. And that's with nominally functioning adults.

nsxwolf 12y ago

People rich enough to own iPhones is an interesting confounding variable for health studies.

return0 12y ago
Not sure how bad that is, though. After all a lot of studies just employ university students
byw 12y ago
Though I'd imagine if a study requires the use of these sensors, an Apple Watch may be cheaper than something from a medical device manufacturer.
iamdanfox 12y ago
Android compatibility looks feasible since the kit will be open source [1]. That should open up the ResearchKit demographic quite a bit! [1]: https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/ https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/
- tomovo 12y ago
  Open? Like Facetime was supposed to be?
  - Alphasite_ 12y ago
    Why does this one keep getting trotted out, lets assume unless they get sued we're fine.
  - freshyill 12y ago
    Blame the patent trolls, not Apple for that.
- sjwright 12y ago
  Not quite so feasible if the kit is written in Swift.

chatmasta 12y ago

This is probably the coolest announcement from the event, at least from the perspective of societal benefits. Medical research faces a real challenge of selection bias. Survey respondents and study participants largely come from two groups: 1) undergrads responding to a campus flyer, and 2) local university-town residents looking to make extra money. Obviously this means respondents are geographically homogenous, and in many cases socioeconomically homogenous as well. Enabling a wider reach for researchers will not only increase sample size, but also eliminate selection bias. This is a very, very good thing. Also, now research isn't limited to only university researchers. I wonder if the plan is to allow participants to earn credits on apple pay.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wahsd 12y ago
Considering the underwhelming nature of healthkit and the rather rudimentary substantial use-case, I am rather reserved.
minthd 12y ago
We've had similar stuff like ResearchKit in existence for quite long. One of the most popular of such sites is patientslikeme.com .It and others did a great job around this, but usage is relatively rare. The hard thing about such sites is:how do you incentivize people to contribute really personal information and do so on a regular basis(even if said action takes a relatively long time) ? So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
- Osmium 12y ago
  > So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ? A large marketing budget helps, e.g. see the video they launched with. Making it easy to use and frictionless would also help (no need to log into the website, no need to figure out how to sign a PDF or download a consent form or whatever the normal user flow is). What concerns me is people gaming the apps; downloading them and filling them with fake data just to be malicious. You fix one problem and introduce another...

dataker 12y ago

The ultimate example that the cure of X also come from programmers, not solely doctors.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

FrojoS 12y ago

Anyone here who has already experience with it? Apparently a handful of hospitals and universities got early access.

tomschlick 12y ago
They would most likely be under strict NDA until the public release.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

voronoff 12y ago

Research works best when the subjects of long term studies can see and react to the data they are generating in real time. Anti-blind trials are the future. /s

dlu 12y ago

This makes gets unreasonably excited. Love that it is open-sourced

fitzwatermellow 12y ago

iTunes links to the first five Apple ResearchKit apps: Asthma Health by Mount Sinai https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/asthma-health-by-mount-sinai/id972625668?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/asthma-health-by-mount-sinai... Share the Journey by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Penn Medicine, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Sage Bionetworks https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/share-the-journey/id972180604?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/share-the-journey/id97218060... Parkinson mPower study app by Sage Bionetworks, University of Rochester, Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=972191200&mt=8&ls=1 https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftw... GlucoSuccess by Mass General https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glucosuccess/id972143976?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glucosuccess/id972143976?mt=... My Heart Counts by Stanford Medicine https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myheart-counts/id972189947?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myheart-counts/id972189947?m...

spike021 12y ago

Wasn't FaceTime supposed to be an open-sourced framework/protocol?

csixty4 12y ago
That was before VirnetX sued them for $708 million for patent violations, reduced to $368.2 by the judge. To avoid having to license the patents in question, Apple re-architected FaceTime so it's no longer peer-to-peer and instead routes everything through central servers.

albertsun 12y ago

Here's the developer overview: https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/researchkit-technical-overview.pdf https://developer.apple.com/researchkit/researchkit-technica... It appears to mostly be an iOS UI toolkit of sorts for easing the creation of individual apps to collect research data. The hard work must still be done by each individual research project.

cafebeen 12y ago

There's certainly going to be a selection bias, as others have said. I think the most exciting opportunity though is for very fine grained and longitudinal studies.

GoodOldNe 12y ago

As someone about to start a medical residency in the Bay Area who is interested in developing projects to work on a research platform like this, could the HN braintrust recommend a resource for learning the basics of whatever developer tools or frameworks that would be required to work with ResearchKit?

somberi 12y ago

Asking to learn. How is this better an an online polling software - like surveymonkey or polldaddy? From reading the press release, it seems like it is a data collection software from patients. Is there more to it?

ishansharma 12y ago
I think the benefit is that the iPhone has sensors that can collect lots of data. For example, the Perkinson's(?) app makes you tap on two targets quickly and say "aaaaa" for long and analyzes the ups and downs in vocal cords using the mic. Patients can't track all this by themselves. Plus, it will automatically send it to researchers. Much easier than making someone enter information on surveymonkey or polldaddy.

jrapdx3 12y ago

Sure, open-source is a good thing. I strongly support OSS and as much as possible run systems at work using FreeBSD, Linux, etc. I've worked in medical practice (and research) for a long time. Considering the vital importance of transactional transparency in carrying out the mission of these fields, as useful as open source is generally, I think the impact in medicine is even greater. But open source is only part of it, open platform is at least as important. I guess I'm not a very trusting soul. Frankly, I don't believe Apple is going to do anything primarily for our good. Rather to my senses the announcement has the flavor of an attempt to gain a toehold or increase market share in the big money research domain. If Apple (or other player) truly wants to generously donate to the public cause, that's wonderful. Then why not support efforts to develop open source, cross-platform apps, assuring all medical research can benefit? Not directed only or in particular at Apple, it's an issue I've raised whenever I have the chance: open source/platform agnostic development can save money and produce more reliable and secure systems.