“In a surprise announcement recently, Apple Inc. preceded the debut of its new line of connected watches by unveiling ResearchKit, a medical research platform that has demonstrated its powerful potential with the first five applications,” Zen Chu and Maulik Majmudar write for Fortune. “The open-source ResearchKit and evolving HealthKit promise new ways for apps and researchers to gather sensor and health data that will enable faster clinical insights at lower cost.”
“As in other product categories, Apple has used thoughtful design and its market strength to create a powerful new platform that lowers the barriers to creating apps,” Chu and Majmudar write. “ResearchKit promises to benefit researchers, physicians and patients across a spectrum of diseases, from rare diseases to widespread chronic diseases that make up the majority of healthcare costs.”
“For those of us active in creating and investing across the future of digital health, 2015 presents a plethora of opportunities to fundamentally change the business models and experiences of healthcare globally,” Chu and Majmudar write. “The complexities of proving healthcare efficacy, value, and adoption still exist but the Golden Age of Digiceuticals is now accelerating.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yet again, Apple makes a dent in the universe!
Related articles:
ResearchKit: The inside story of how Apple’s revolutionary medical research platform was born – March 19, 2015
Apple’s open source ResearchKit will change the world for the better – March 9, 2015
Apple debuts ResearchKit, giving medical researchers the tools to revolutionize medical studies – March 9, 2015
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53323bb4e4b0cebc6a28ffa2/t/53639299e4b0c6561be3e4dd/1399034521681/
Launched from my Apple Watch.
I hereby judge that an Apple Watch Edition is AWE then some!
AWEsome
Since I’m pretty close to my “golden years” this “golden age for health care” thing sounds pretty good to me!
Yep, Apple wants us to live longer and healthier lives. That way we can buy more of their devices during our ‘extended’ lives. 😉
Sounds like a plan to me!
Golden Age ? Knock off the RDF until there’s a lot more math.
Like Microsoft is moving the needle when it comes to healthcare. Right? pf
1a. Nobody brought up MS until u did. But let’s talk about MS. Bill Gates has donated a pile of money publicly. As for MS itself, there has been no news.
1b. Your comment is disengenuous, non-sequitur (as I understand the term). We’re supposed to be talking about research and the alleged golden age.
1c. Finally, u did not respond to a single aspect of my comment.
1d. Conclusion: go visit your junior high school teacher for remedial lessons on reading and writing.
“MS. Bill Gates has donated a pile of money publicly. ”
a FIRST why donate money PUBLICLY? Apple people like Cook and Jobs donated PRIVATELY.
b) In spite of donating Bill Gates is still the richest dude in the world. His net worth is about 10 times Jobs highest. Ask yourself “Did the dude rip off the Msft fanboy idiots?” like stupid expensive Windows upgrades?
c) Here is how Bill gates made his money.
Quoting Judge Jackson (the judge mind you not the prosecutor) of the USA vs Msft trial:
“Microsoft executives proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. … Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.”
(if you don’t get what Judge Jackson said : Msft breaks laws and executives regularly lie and cheat. )
LOL.
I can see there’s a lot of mindless voting and/or troll voting here. 1. Nobody mentioned the math 2. Nobody commented.
It’s a democratic vote but zero accounting for brainless clicks.
Recently there seems to be massive amounts of down-voting for just about everything, no matter the topic, whether pro or anti Apple, negative or positive, silly or serious, in agreement or disagreement.
Must be legions of internet basement trolls with little else to do – or some sort of bot on the loose.
(I can;t wait to see how many down votes this gets!)
Wow! First downvote in less than a minute! I’m going for the record! Help me out here!
Your ego must be very fragile if a few low votes make you upset.
My reason for the single star is that RDF is associated with Apple making the golden age of health care statement. They did nothing of the sort and simply released it as a new service (with no direct revenue associated). That an article makes such a claim it up to them and has nothing to do with Apple. That is not RDF since the reporters are not employees of Apple.
It is disingenuous of you to suggest that Apple are conducting RDF for this new service. Time will tell how successful this approach will be but the fact that one research program signed up 25000 volunteers suggests that this is a good method.
The RDF is for the person who said (paraphrase) “this signals a golden age.”
Don’t people connect the dots well ?
If I knew how to put the sound of something going right over someone’s head into print this is where I would write it.
Oh well, here goes! Whoooooooooooosh!
Oops. Sorry Doggonetoo, I thought your comment was directed at me. I’ll go sit in the corner now.
This was said to be available when it was announced. I checked the native Health app and there’s nothing, checked the App Store and nothing. Can anyone tell me how to sign up for these HealthKit data contribution/sharing studies?
ResearchKit** not HealthKit. How do I sign up for the ResearchKit programs?
I just highlighted the words “ResearchKit” in your post and used this new fangled thing called an internet search and found several links on the first page of results.
I already tried that. You end up on Apple’s website where they say the apps are on the App Store (they aren’t, that I can find) but there is a link to an App Store page that just tells you to go back to the same exact Apple webpage. It’s an endless loop:
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewFeature?id=973253773&mt=8&ls=1
http://www.apple.com/researchkit/
Ah, maybe it’s because they are for iPhone and I was using my iPad. Nevermind, got it
“Golden age of health care?”
For whom?
Big Pharma, who will be funding the research. The public sources for medical research, like the National Institute for Health and Center for Disease Control are being defunded by the Republican Congress because they keep using science.
It will help big pharma, small pharma, biotechs of every size, and the companies that support them, etc.
I work in one, and write the contracts for phase III studies (mostly). A number of our central labs and biostat contracts are with vendors who use smartphones and custom devices with their apps for tracking and collecting study data. It’s already being done, more or less. Sure, we still use the old fashioned 3-5 question paper surveys that are laughably subjective, but it’s still very early days using devices to do it better.
ResearchKit should be a rocket boost to that. Snark on it now all you want, but wait 3 years to see the first returns on it. Or wait 5 years and it’ll be a given to use smart watches and ResearchKit for data collection and analysis.
Figuring it out how to use it, and then how to handle all that data will take time. But when they do (and they will), it should kick off a minor golden age at least.
And they open sourced it. Big deal there. There’s a lot of talent out there in the field that will dive into that and work with it in ways not ever envisioned by Apple. I expect the data collection and analysis to improve markedly over the next decade+, and the cross-polination of ideas and therapies will be stunning.
I think your hopes for the future impact of ResearchKit are well founded and I share them, although I am at the end of the chain of the impact rather than in the middle of it, as you are.
My snarkiness about the ultimate destination of the gold isn’t about the smart, hard working, dedicated people in the middle of the process. It’s about an industry that develops drugs that cost $200 per dose to manufacture and charges the patients insurance provider $10,000 per dose to buy the medication. It’s about an industry that pays doctors directly to prescribe medications that have little impact on the outcomes for the patient, other than to run up the bill. It’s about an industry that influenced Congress to place wording in the legislation for Medicare Part D that forbade Medicare from negotiating prices with the pharmaceutical manufacturers. For people that believe those are correct actions to take, I remain skeptical of any outcome other than more greed at anyones expense.
Apple had better be careful how this is marketed. If it becomes too much defined as a healthcare or medical device then Obama gets to to tax it under the “Medical Device” provision in Obamacare Law. It could then encompass your iPhone too if it’s being used as part of the medical research.
Yeah it sounds stupid but, is it really that far-fetched when talking about this administration…?
All it takes is another little “motivational talk” to Justice Roberts and, Boom! It’s declared a medical device.