“On September 27, 2013, during a dimly-lit presentation at Stanford’s MedX conference, Dr. Stephen Friend told an audience about the future of medical research,” Daniela Hernandez reports for Fusion. “‘Imagine ten trials, several thousand patients,’ said Friend, the founder of Seattle-based Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit that champions open science and data sharing. ‘Here you have genetic information, and you have what drugs they took, how they did. Put that up in the cloud, and you have a place where people can go and query it, [where] they can make discoveries.’ In this scenario, Friend said, patients would be able to control who could access their information, and for which purposes. But their health data would be effectively open-sourced.”
“The crowd was receptive. Several people looking to share their data with scientists stood up to ask what options they had. There were a few open-source health data projects in the works, Friend replied, but nothing fully-formed. ‘We’re pretty close,’ he reassured them,” Hernandez reports. “He was closer than he thought. Sitting in the audience that day was Mike O’Reilly, a newly minted vice president for medical technologies at Apple. A few months earlier, Apple had poached O’Reilly from Masimo, a Bay Area-based sensor company that developed portable iPhone-compatible health trackers. Now, he was interested in building something else, something that had the potential to implement Friend’s vision of a patient-centered, medical research utopia and radically change the way clinical studies were done.”
“Fast-forward roughly 18 months. Last week, Apple unveiled ResearchKit, an open-source platform that will make it easier for scientists to build apps that collect health data for research studies from volunteers, along with five iPhone apps aimed at some of the most costly medical conditions in the world. A day later, thousands of people had already downloaded these apps,” Hernandez reports. “The sheer number of participants was so huge that many are already calling ResearchKit and its companion apps a revolution in how medical science will be done.”
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Once again, Apple changes the world for the better!
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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
And they say that Apple isn’t innovating. The problem is that those who say that simply don’t understand what real innovation is, they can only apply it to fanciful, inpractical ‘silver suit’ like marketing gimmicks like driverless cars and parcel delivering drones. Real innovation usually starts below the radar and then bursts into prominence in the public/commercial consciousness once it’s true value is understood in practice, indeed rather like Apples products generally. It needs real imagination and insight to understand the true implications before that.