Amid all the hype and speculation surrounding the launch of Apple Watch, another one of the company's innovative platforms has gone somewhat under the radar.
Apple's ResearchKit apps are already changing the way people participate in clinical trials by providing real-time feedback to medical researchers using their iPhones.
Five apps were launched on March 9 to gather data from individuals who meet different criteria for clinical trials: My Heart Counts for cardiovascular disease, mPower for Parkinson's, Asthma Health, GlucoSuccess for diabetes and Share the Journey for the aftereffects of breast cancer.
According to researchers at the academic medical institutions where the apps were developed, ResearchKit has the potential to rapidly reduce the legwork needed to launch a successful clinical trial, the
Wall Street Journal reports.
Researchers are intrigued by the transformative potential of smartphone apps. Kathryn Schmitz, an epidemiologist at University of Pennsylvania and an investigator on the Share the Journey study, said it recently took her team three years, including the sending of 60,000 notices, to recruit just 351 patients for a separate conventional study about the impact of exercise on breast-cancer survivors.
For Share the Journey, however, which has less stringent enrollment criteria, it took just one month to enroll nearly 2,000 patients. In these cases, the clinical trials are not testing drugs, but learning about the long-term effects of chronic disease and determining whether smartphones help patients deal with their symptoms.
Apple plans to make ResearchKit available on an open-source basis so that it won't be limited to iPhones and the apps can potentially reach a broader population. Meanwhile, the platform has
caught the attention of other companies that aim to expand its use. On Monday, IBM launched a partnership with Apple, creating a new unit that will aggregate health information on the cloud and provide insight to health companies, including Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson.
While ResearchKit apps hold the promise of advancing medical knowledge by increasing the accessibility of data, arguably the best part about them is that patients can derive immediate value from their participation in studies. This makes the experience far more worthwhile, and if the apps are able to safeguard privacy and avoid breaches, they will likely become a standard tool and complement for countless areas of clinical investigation.
Eric Risberg/AP
