Stanford University said that 11,000 iPhone owners signed up for a heart health study using Apple’s newly-announced ResearchKit in the first 24 hours–completely unprecedented numbers.
“To get 10,000 people enrolled in a medical study normally, it would take a year and 50 medical centers around the country,” said Alan Yeung, medical director of Stanford Cardiovascular Health, speaking to Bloomberg.
Stanford is one of five academic centers that have developed apps that use the iPhone’s built-in accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS to provide data which assists in medical research. There are, say researchers, both pros & cons to recruiting study participants through ResearchKit …
The big advantage is that researchers no longer have to rely on what study participants claim about things like the amount of exercise they take: the iPhone reports the actual data.
The iPhone helps address a problem that standard trials often encounter: people enrolled in studies often falsely report their activity to researchers. By using its internal components or secondary devices connected wirelessly via Bluetooth, the iPhone can silently measure users’ behavior, without relying on them to keep track or be honest about what they’re doing.
But there are also downsides. For example, iPhone users may not be representative of the U.S. population as a whole.
The average iPhone user is more likely to have graduate and doctoral degrees than the average Android user, and has a higher income as well, according to polling company CivicScience Inc. Those sort of demographic differences could skew the findings from a study.
Participants may also accidentally select options when answering questions through the app, or have their responses biased by being presented with multiple-choice responses rather than a human being asking open-ended questions.
These difficulties aside, the potential seems huge. Todd Sherer, CEO of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, says that a traditional study with 800 participants over five years cost around $60M. The Parkinson’s app had 5,589 participants by Tuesday morning.
If you want to know more about how ResearchKit works, and how you can help future medical studies, check out our hands-on guide.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Thanks Lovejoy – what does Tinker think about this?
What a load of crap. You can’t perform any meaningful studies through something like this because you have far too many uncontrolled variables. It’d be like assessing student performance on homework alone!
I think you would have to look at the methodology of each study to determine that. Given that the studies will have large sample sizes (previously too expensive for most studies), a lot of possibilities here.
Each study would have to collect some info on the participants (the thing in the article about iphone users not being proportionally representative is no big deal; with a large sample, results can be weighted). And there might need to be some followups. But a well thought out study could work great.
Yet Standford and so many other academic and healthcare entities disagree with you. Hmm, strange…
You also can’t perform meaningful phone calls, there’s no wire or rotary dial. Navigation? Screw that, how can this replace a sextant? I mean, come on, right?
Judging people on homework alone in many cases would be much better. Ever heard of test anxiety. Being in the education world test are the worst way to judge how people are doing? This is a great idea for all the reasons they gave.
Wow, Armchair Quarterback of the year award!!
That’s right, it’s crap and all those major academic and healthcare entities who are involved and putting their name with this thing are just dumb, you need to go educate them!!
Well it sure is too bad they didn’t contact you first! Think of all the time and effort they could’ve saved if they spoke to a medical researcher of such great renowned!
Easy come, easy go.
“The average iPhone user is more likely to have graduate and doctoral degrees than the average Android user, and has a higher income as well, according to polling company CivicScience Inc. Those sort of demographic differences could skew the findings from a study.”
That would be funny…if it wasn’t so sad. Though I must say that looking around ‘all’ I see is iPhones, also people with ‘low income jobs’. They’re likely on plan with a subsidised iPhone, which *seems* to be cheaper but usually isn’t.
Oh well, supposedly the whole subsidised iPhone model is shrinking as more and more people are buying the phone wholesale, as I always have done. This could result in slower upgrades as people don’t hand them down to their kids, but retain it for longer than 2 years.
As for HealthKit, this is really great for researchers and patients. The scale of economics come into play here, in a great way.
You mean ResearchKit? HealthKit is directed more towards your individual health and how you fare today compared with yesterday… ResearchKit is directed towards scientists and doctors… I guess you meant ResearchKit in that context.(?)
One important point that this article missed is that Research Kit is going to be open source. I would think that appropriately equipped Android and Windows phone could join the party as well.
I don’t know about you, but i don’t take my phone with me when i’m doing yoga, or on a stationary bike. Definitely don’t take it into the pool with me. Nor do i attach it to my hip when i get up and putter during commercials. Couldn’t have it on me at work where i carried bolts of fabric around like a mad-woman for six hours and climb up and down ladders 8-50 times a day. It sits on a table while i go out gardening so i don’t accidentally drop into the dirt. So unless i’m actively carrying it while, i don’t know, jogging, how exactly does this app accurately measure my level of activity?
Only a matter of time, when we will have more accurate inputs and tools to convert these raw information into more useful information. No doubts, the ResearchKit is a good tool to start things.
I think that ResearchKit is a monumental advance for the clinical research industry. It is only natural to migrate clinical trials to the place where patients are spending the most time already: on their mobile devices. By doing so, research programs can eliminate some of the largest barriers causing a lack of participation in clinical trials; patients can participate from the comfort of their own homes, or on the run, making participation more convenient than ever. Furthermore, retention rates should soar. A large part of drop off in research programs is due to patients finding it too difficult or too inconvenient to follow up with the programs they have volunteered for. Now, following up, reporting adverse events, signing consent, and even remembering to take medications at certain times of day are all at their fingertips and reported as any other data would be. If CROs aren’t taking advantage of ResearchKit, I feel as though they’ll be left behind when it comes time to finding sponsors to contract them for research.