Apple’s ResearchKit: truth lies in big numbers
To be honest, the most interesting thing about Apple’s event on Monday, March 9 was the launch of ResearchKit, an open-source initiative that aims to allow iPhone owners to provide medical research teams with information about their health. Not long ago, I wrote the impact on me of being able to carry around with me a device that allows me to monitor my heart rate and how this had given me an inkling — I’m no doctor — that something was awry with my health.
ResearchKit is actually a complement to HealthKit, the app that iPhone owners can install — it comes as standard with new terminals and with the upgrade to iOS 8 — to register a range of health parameters using external sensors (some manufacturers of these, such as Fitbit, have said that they will not be linking up with HealthKit because they intend to build their own competitor to the Apple Watch: a serious strategic error, I would say). Once a consent agreement has been signed on the device itself, users can decide if they want to provide data collected by their sensors to researchers.
But some medics have criticized the initiative, saying that the metrics obtained by tracking bracelets are not sufficiently reliable to be used for scientific research, and that HealthKit itself is fails to meet the high standards that Apple has previously set. Needless to say, one thing is to provide data, say, about my heart rate to medical researchers, which doesn’t seem such a bad idea, while it is quite another to do so via a group of respondents who may well be taking their bracelets on and off, or worse, that there are bugs in the app that interrupt monitoring for certain periods.
Nevertheless, the idea seems to appeal to users: more than 10,000 people agreed to provide their data in the first 24 hours after the launch, a clear indication that they are not concerned about privacy risks normally related to health information, which is normally subjected to special protection if the aim is medical research.
I’m not sure whether the best-informed people to comment on this are doctors, or if medical researcher would be more suited, even though they are smaller in number. There are many kinds of medics, and it’s not as if they are particularly well-informed about technology compared to the rest of us: from what I have heard at medical conferences, I have my doubts.
But researchers certainly understand the importance for their work of having data of this kind at their disposal: data is always the bottleneck in any research, and it is possible to design control systems that isolate error incidence or tainted sample, and in any case, it is always better to have more data than too little, as the title of this piece argues. I am convinced that Apple’s initiative could play a big role in medical research, and what’s more, I believe we will see the fruit of this in the near future.
(En español, aquí)
