The long awaited "Spring Forward" event Apple has finally delivered its promises and the Cupertino giant has made several important announcements. The company CEO, Tim Cook took the stage and recalled that the ecosystem of the iPhone is growing rapidly. He said that the iPhone will continue to transform every part of our lives in three ways: CarPlay, HomeKit and HealthKit.
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Last night in San Francisco, Vice President of Operations, Jeff Williams, announced ResearchKit , an open source framework designed to help collect data for medical studies . It is designed for medical research and health, in order to help doctors and scientists to collect data more frequently and with greater precision using consumer applications.
The idea, said Williams, is to turn over 700 million iPhones sold worldwide in "powerful [...] tools" for self-diagnosis and research . By overcoming the obstacles faced by medical facilities professionals, and going up data, Apple hopes ResearchKit help researchers to source with a pool of "testers" much larger, rather than tapping into clinical trials.
Apple has partnered with a number of hospitals and schools before the official release of ResearchKit but Williams has highlighted some during the keynote. The University of Rochester, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University and worked in tandem to develop an application that allows to measure the progression of Parkinson's disease. On the client side, users can test themselves by making a timed run, or by manually entering the data, or keeping track of their physical activity.
Another application, Asthma Health, will pair with a Bluetooth connectivity inhalers to provide a diagnosis, but will also rely on a GPS chip to warn people with the pathogen and eventually disseminate data to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. MyHearts Counts, developed by Stanford University and Oxford, aims to help cardiovascular disease, while an application for breast cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and others will collect biometric data research.
Obviously, the sensitivity of health data raises privacy concerns , but Williams said that Apple will not see all the data. All information collected, he has said, are transmitted securely and directly to institutional databases.
The four applications mentioned above will be released today, said Williams. However, for the future ResearchKit Apple is available as open source resource, in the hope that it be extended to other platforms.
See also : Watch Apple: it will provide 18 hours of battery life
Last night in San Francisco, Vice President of Operations, Jeff Williams, announced ResearchKit , an open source framework designed to help collect data for medical studies . It is designed for medical research and health, in order to help doctors and scientists to collect data more frequently and with greater precision using consumer applications.
Apple has partnered with a number of hospitals and schools before the official release of ResearchKit but Williams has highlighted some during the keynote. The University of Rochester, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University and worked in tandem to develop an application that allows to measure the progression of Parkinson's disease. On the client side, users can test themselves by making a timed run, or by manually entering the data, or keeping track of their physical activity.
Obviously, the sensitivity of health data raises privacy concerns , but Williams said that Apple will not see all the data. All information collected, he has said, are transmitted securely and directly to institutional databases.
The four applications mentioned above will be released today, said Williams. However, for the future ResearchKit Apple is available as open source resource, in the hope that it be extended to other platforms.