Apple’s ResearchKit: Democratizing Medical Research and Clinical Trials
Medical research has been playing a vital role in the healthcare industry. Yet, it becomes quite difficult for the organizations and researchers to collect clinical data via mobile devices. As they are not able to reach an extensive group of audience, so they can’t perform a mobile-based research.
In order to overcome these challenges, Apple launched ResearchKit in 2015. This framework allows researchers and developers to build robust apps for medical research. Since its launch, it has become easier for researchers to register patients and collect medical data more often via mobile devices.
What is ResearchKit?
Introduced by Apple, ResearchKit is an open source framework making medical research app creation seamless. It gives an option to include powerful features in the medical research app. ResearchKit is tightly integrated with HealthKit, so researchers can retrieve relevant data for their studies and doctors can conduct flexible medical surveys using the customizable modules.
Working and Benefits
With ResearchKit, professional app developers can create research-oriented and well-defined healthcare research apps. In addition, medical app developers can create model presentation and survey apps with this framework.
With that, medical researchers can create matching templates to their survey requirements. Once the visual consent gets approved, the template can be spread among the participants.
The active data collection allows researchers to collect health-related data from the participants using iPhones and Apple Watches, making research for diabetes, cancer, asthma, and other diseases possible for them.
Here are some of the benefits of Apple’s ResearchKit for healthcare research industry:
- The diversity of the participants
- Precision based data collection for medical research
- Opportunity to obtain a huge amount of data
- More awareness among people about various diseases
- Time-saving research models
- Participant’s PHI secure and intact
- Ability to collaborate with other research institutes
Even though ResearchKit provides ample benefits to the medical professionals, but there are a few concerns that they come across. The researchers often feel that it is unable to provide a complaint and well-arranged data storage facility. Hence, they have to opt for third-party services for the storage.
In addition, ResearchKit is just limited to the iOS which seems a major concern for the developers, as Android is a big mobile platform other than Apple’s iOS.
Apple’s Research is surely going to bring a transformation in the healthcare industry. The change needed by the present-day environment of this industry has become possible with this framework which is going to bring a positive change for sure.