Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body

Lashdots writes: Amid the unveiling of the Apple Watch, Tim Cook's wrist distracted from another new product last month: ResearchKit, an open source iOS platform designed to help researchers design apps for medical studies—and reach millions of potential research subjects through their iPhones. Alongside the company's new frontiers, like the car and the home, Cook told Jim Cramer last month that health "may be the biggest one of all." As Fast Company reports, Cook says Apple's devices could could help pinpoint diseases within decades—and position the company at the center of a "significantly underestimated" mobile-health industry.

Comments

ResearchKit is not HealthKit

[SuperKendall]

HealthKit is for those people measuring metrics around heart rate and so on (which it seems to me lots of people do simply to improve how they work out rather than because they think there is anything wrong).

ResearchKit is about measuring what ACTUALLY happens to you over the course of a day or week, rather than what you imagine (or pretend) is happening.

It's also about vastly expanding the data points researchers have into how disease or lifestyle affects people.

And the whole thing is open source so there can be ResearchKit clients for Android too...

It comes from other sensors

[SuperKendall]

ResearchKit is basically just a data-funnel, yes - but even that is useful to have as a basis for collecting health data, because it can pull anything from HealthKit you give it permission to.

Healthkit in turn, is where any number of devices and specialized monitors (like glucose measurement) can feed data into.

The Watch may not track glucose levels, but since HealthKit can track that data, as long as you have a sensor it can still be fed back to researchers, or into something like a glucose-monitoring Apple Watch App.