Building a Successful Mobile Research App

The challenge in medical research

Medical research faces a significant challenge when it comes to study recruitment and retention. Many studies target potential participants in-person by asking patients while at their doctor’s appointments, or by hanging flyers around the office, waiting room, or hospital. Others send out loads of snail mail or email. With this approach, only a limited sample can be reached, and out of those, a smaller number will be eligible -- and out of those, an even smaller number will enroll! Clearly, studies would benefit from larger enrollment, but reaching potential participants is a bear. And with all of that effort (and cost) expended on enrollment, what about keeping your participants engaged in the study longitudinally?With much of the general population owning a mobile device, it is easier for researchers to get through to potential participants via their smartphone than to hope an eligible participant happens to walk into their research facility. And as for the participants, interacting with their smartphone is a much more convenient, natural way to be involved in a study than to physically travel to different sites or manage their mail.Apple

ResearchKit: the dawn of a new era for medical research?

Even with all of these benefits to using mobile devices to perform research, software is expensive and rarely the specialty of researchers. The time, money, expertise, and resources needed to build an app often make for an insurmountable barrier for researchers to use the technology. Apple released ResearchKit as the first step to reducing this barrier.ResearchKit is an open source iOS framework that helps medical researchers, alongside developers, build research study apps faster. Developers can leverage its code snippets to incorporate ResearchKit’s core functionality of eligibility verification, obtaining electronic informed consent, enrollment, and the collection of survey information and data from active tasks (using the available iPhone hardware).Released in March of 2015, ResearchKit was touted as beginning a new era in medical research. In this new world, apps would be easy to build and release using ResearchKit’s open source code, and enrolling large numbers of participants would be as easy as publishing an app in the App Store.

In fact, simultaneous to the release of ResearchKit, five medical research applications using the ResearchKit framework were published on the Apple App Store. One of these, Stanford’s MyHeart Counts study, enrolled 10,000 participants in its first day(!), something that researchers said would have taken at least one year and some 50 medical centers to accomplish using traditional methods.Despite this and other successes, only a couple dozen apps in the eighteen months since ResearchKit was released have made their way into the App Store and the hands of research participants. We haven’t seen wide adoption despite clear evidence for the power of mobile applications to significantly improve the medical research landscape.

Why not? To answer that question, let’s take a more detailed look at the components necessary to build a research study application. At a minimum, there are three necessary components:

1. ? A way to gather data from participants (we’ll call this the mobile app)
2. ?A place to send and store the data collected from the phones (a backend)
3. ?A way for researchers to access the data (a researcher portal)

Let’s consider these pieces one at a time.

1. Mobile App: A way to gather data from participants

2. Backend: A place to send and store the data collected from the phones

3. Researcher Portal: A way for researchers to access the data

Next Steps