In Depth: What is ResearchKit? A guide to Apple's medical research platform

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What is ResearchKit?

We tend to get excited over the shiny new boxes Apple makes. Shiny new iPhones, shiny new MacBooks and oh-so-shiny iPads. But something else Apple just brought out could have a much greater effect on us all longer-term: Apple ResearchKit.

It's a platform designed to help out with medical research, and not one that requires any extra hardware, or hard-to-understand software. It'll use iPhones, iPhone apps and a similar cloud data network we all use today.

"We're incredibly confident that ResearchKit is going to transform medical research," said Apple CEO Tim Cook. But how is it going to work, and why could it be so important?

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What does ResearchKit do?

There has been a lot of talk recently about how smartwatches might be used to improve healthcare. And talk of things like glucose monitoring in contact lenses (a Google Project) brings to mind quite a gadgety angle.

However, the basic aim of ResearchKit is more pragmatic. It's about data.

ResearchKit is a a platform into which apps feed into, and it will be used to collect and collate reams of data. This data might be inputted manually or automatically, depending on the app used. And where relevant, the data can be collated and used in wider research. Importantly, though, it won't be Apple doing this.

Apple won't have any access to your data, if you're worried that ResearchKit is just an alarmingly creepy way to mine your personal information.

Which conditions could it help with?

ResearchKit is a framework designed to enable other people's ideas. As such, it's pretty much completely agnostic about the conditions it can help with.

To prove its worth, though, Apple came out swinging with five apps designed to help with the research of five major conditions. These are asthma, diabetes, Parkinson's, breast cancer and heart conditions.

We've seen the sorts of ways it can help with Parkinson's in particular. The app incorporates a few basic tests designed to help monitor the disease and its current state of development.

They are designed to roughly replicate the sorts of tests a GP might administer, using software and the sensors on an iPhone in place of a decade or so's medical training/experience. And y'know, a doctor's eyes, ears and the rest.

You hold the phone while walking 20 paces back and forwards, and the gyroscope/accelerometer monitor your gait. Parkinson's causes a patient to walk in a stuttery tremor-y fashion because of the way it affects the central nervous system.

Then there's the vocal test. You say "Ahhh" into the microphone for as long as you can and the app monitors tremors in your voice caused by the disorder. These sorts of tests can be applied to all sorts of conditions, with the five talked about so far just being the starting point.

Who worked on it?

Apple was keen to demonstrate its legitimacy by talking about the research institutions it has worked with on ResearchKit and the initial roster of apps.

The Univeristy of Rochester and Xuanwu Hospital in China worked on the Parkinson's side of ResearchKit, while other partners include UCLA, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Stanford University and Oxford University.

There's really no limit to who can work on ResearchKit apps, though. It's not a series of medical technologies, but a platform through which the data from medical-themed apps can be brought together.

The future and potential issues

How could it be useful?

Sounds dull? Well it isn't when you think about how it could be used. On a smaller scale, it will let doctors keep a much closer eye on patients' conditions.

Consider a patient with heart arrhythmia, an abnormal heart rhythm. Where your average person may not be able to accurately monitor their heart beat using the normal counting method, let alone identify an abnormal rhythm, an Apple Watch should be able to do both with zero fuss.

So should the camera/flash combo of an iPhone, in fact, but we're yet to see if the heart rate ResearchKit app lets you do this. Within no time you'd have a regular record of the condition.

ResearchKit should make recording your body's functions an order of magnitude more often totally pain-free. And it's not just about enabling what you might otherwise need a medical professional for either.

Just getting patients to record any sort of regular diary of impressions can be difficult enough, and by making that process easier it should in turn make it easier for GPs to convince them to do so.

ResearchKit is also a lot more advanced and flexible than the systems doctors use to record patient data (based on our experience in the UK at least), which is where the wider uses of the framework come in handy. It will make sharing data between doctors and institutions much easier, and can be used as the basis for extremely huge research trials.

Think about it: Apple has sold 700 millions iPhones, and while just a fraction of those will be active at this point, it is a pretty good base to work with. If Tim Cook gets his way, it could end up being one of the technology building blocks for medical research across the world.

What are the potential issues?

One of the great bits of news is that ResearchKit is open source. Now, what this means is that its source code is freely available and can be distributed and modified without Apple suing anyone for doing so.

However, it doesn't mean that every single part of the resulting infrastructure will be. Take Android, for instance: it is open source, but nowadays core parts of it are not. At present, the whole Android front-end is based on Google Now, which is not an open source piece of software. Google has made sure you don't get the full experience with the open source take on Android, and it could be the same case here.

Apple announcing ResearchKit as open source will be enough to convince many, but there are some bad signs already. If this is really a purely altruistic open source project, why didn't Apple co-announce support for Android? Now that would be a project with truly world-changing potential.

It seems likely Apple is going to try to hold onto a good degree of control over ResearchKit, as it would be a great way to give Mac computers a foothold in health services nation-wide. In the corporate world, there's generally always another way to view a good deed.

There are also going to be limits to the quality of data ResearchKit will be able to harvest, at least for now, with readings captured by patients themselves with hardware that's generally not maintained in the way professional medical tools are. The iPhone is not going to suddenly become every practitioner's favourite tool.

However, the thing is that if Apple keeps the reins on ResearchKit loose enough, there's little reason it couldn't in theory be used completely outside of any Apple hardware. And then, well, the sky's the limit.