Apple opens ResearchKit to developers

ResearchKit which was announced at Apple’s special event in March, is an open framework that could be used by scientists and medical research teams to collect data for studies, is now open for researchers and developers.

The first research apps developed using ResearchKit study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and have enrolled over 60,000 iPhone users in just the first few weeks of being available on the App Store. Starting today, medical researchers all over the world will be able to use ResearchKit to develop their own apps and developers can also contribute new research modules to the open source framework.

We are delighted and encouraged by the response to ResearchKit from the medical and research community and the participants contributing to medical research. Studies that historically attracted a few hundred participants are now attracting participants in the tens of thousands, said Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations. Medical researchers all over the world are actively exploring how ResearchKit can help them study even more diseases, and we believe the impact on global understanding of health and wellness will be profound.

The open source framework allows any medical researcher to take advantage of the initial modules in ResearchKit to study health and wellness and better understand disease. Developers can also build new modules based on the open source code and contribute them to ResearchKit. The initial customisable modules address the most common elements found in research studies—participant consent, surveys and active tasks.

• Participant consent: Participant consent is a critical element to research studies, and with ResearchKit researchers can access a visual e-consent template that can be customised to explain the details of the study and obtain participant signatures. This module makes it easy for the researcher to include elements such as video segments explaining the study and an interactive quiz to confirm the participant’s understanding.

• Surveys: The survey module provides a pre-built user interface that makes it easy to customise questions and answers for study participants to complete and immediately share with researchers.

• Active Tasks: The Active Task module enables researchers to gather more targeted data for their study by inviting participants to perform activities that generate data using iPhone’s advanced sensors. Initial Active Task modules include tasks to measure motor activities, fitness, cognition and voice, and with the framework available as open source, the research community can contribute even more active tasks to ResearchKit.

ResearchKit turns iPhone into a powerful tool for medical research. When granted permission by the participant, ResearchKit apps can access data from advanced iPhone sensors like the accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone and GPS to gain insight into a participant’s activity levels, motor impairments, memory and more. ResearchKit works seamlessly with HealthKit, a software framework Apple introduced with iOS 8 to provide developers the ability for health and fitness apps to communicate with each other. With permission from the participant, ResearchKit apps can access and use data from the Health app such as weight, blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use, which are measured by third-party devices and apps.

For more information on ResearchKit, visit www.apple.com/researchkit and for details on how to access the open source framework, visit www.researchkit.org.