Apple has announced that its new ResearchKit open source software framework intended to help medical researchers collect patient data will be available next month, and the company has introduced a suite of apps used to collect the data. An Asthma Health app developed by the Icahn School of Medicine and LifeMap Solutions is now available on the App Store for download by US patients, and the Icahn School of medicine is conducting a study using the data collected.
Apple Senior VP of Operations Jeff Williams commented, “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. ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
One of the researchers, Yu-Feng Yvonne Chan, the Director of Personalized Medicine and Digital Health at the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai, said, “We hope that over time, users of our Asthma Health app will experience less asthma-related distress, better symptom control, improved quality of life, and fewer unexpected medical visits. We hope that our app will enable asthma patients to gain greater insight into their individual condition and take charge of their own health. Furthermore, this could be one of the largest real-world epidemiological studies of asthma and offer researchers invaluable insight into the disease process.”
Patients using the app can electronically consent to participate in the study, and the app can then provide data relevant to symptom patterns collected by its accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope and GPS sensors, as well as data collected by external inhaler monitoring devices, to researchers. Participants can also fill out surveys through the app.
Users of the app can choose which data they want to provide to the researchers. According to the LifeMap Solutions web site, data that can be submitted from the Asthma Health app includes peak expiratory flow and inhaler usage in addition to sleep data, height/weight, work attendance, triggers, physical activity, and more.
The app can also provide notifications to the user, including air quality alerts and notices about the medication, and it includes educational features on inhaler technique and asthma management.
Read the Apple press release.
Read the Icahn Medical School and LifeMap Solutions press release.
