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

There's a name for this.

[fustakrakich]

What do they call these nervous nellies who constantly monitor their pulse and blood pressure, hyperventilate with the least bit of excitement? It's kinda like 'helicopter' parents, but they 'hover' over themselves. *I've fallen! And I can't get up!*

Re:There's a name for this.

[ColdWetDog]

Money.

Lots of money.

Re:There's a name for this.

[Anubis IV]

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding with regards to what ResearchKit is about. It's not HealthKit, which is aimed at helping people to be healthier. It's ResearchKit, which is aimed at connecting medical researchers with voluntary subjects who are willing to submit anonymous data. As it is right now, researchers seeking data on how well a treatment affects a disease need to first seek out people with that disease, then they need to either bring those subjects into a doctor's office to be tested, which is typically done on an infrequent basis, or they need to rely on self-reporting out in the field. There are numerous flaws in those methodologies, leading to all sorts of lies, omissions, and other forms of error creeping in. And that's the best we've had to rely on up until now. Plus, response rates are ridiculously low since there's no great way to put researchers in touch with potential subjects, and even when potential subjects are aware of the research, most don't want to deal with the hassle.

By increasing awareness, taking the hassle out of it, and even promising to open source ResearchKit, Apple is providing a foundation on which researchers can finally address those issues. They're putting the diagnostic tools directly into our smart devices, and are doing so across any platform, thus allowing the researchers to get frequently-collected data from subjects under actual conditions, rather than having to rely on faulty self-reporting or infrequent lab visits. They can also get a much wider swath of data, allowing them to have more certainty about their results, along with a better understanding of what "normal" looks like. Even if a hypochondriac is using an app that relies on ResearchKit, it's a win for all of us, since it helps to establish more baseline readings from which we can better understand how our bodies are supposed to be behaving when we're in the real world, rather than in a lab. Moreover, it may eventually help to establish a baseline reading for them, which could then be used to show them that their readings are in line with where they were before when we knew they were well.

All of which is to say, this has nothing at all to do with people fretting about being sick, and has everything to do with helping research doctors better understand diseases and how the treatments they are providing address them. Joke about it if you want, but it sounds like a worthy goal to me.

Oooh....

[EmeraldBot]

"Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body"

Sounds kinky.

Re:Oooh....

[lister king of smeg]

"Apple's Next Frontier Is Your Body"

Sounds kinky.

Unfortunately for your fantasies, they will probably limit themselves to the right hand or the forehead, like the original plan went.

So if the mark of the beast is an apple emblem, does that make apple the forbidden fruit?

Your body....

[Gronkers]

We already had a South Park episode about this.

Re:mobile-health industry...

[serviscope_minor]

Just them?

You can add "yeah, but on a STEAM engine" if you go back far enough. Fun fact: if you look at some old drawings of Watt steam engines, you can see a pecliar sun-and-planet gear arrangement instead of a crank because someone patented the use of a crank ON A STEAM ENGINE. For bonus points they patented it after it was already in use, but that didn't stop them litigating.

Patents have basically been broken since their inception.

It's all over

[Culture20]

Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.

Re:Where is the hardware?

[Dutch Gun]

Apple's iProbe (EZ-insertion technology patent pending) and monitor kit will sold separately for the low price of $139.95. Look for a public announcement soon!

Re:The next big scare

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

...will be health issues and obsession with health.

Why exactly is this bad? Weren't we making fun of the fatties just last week?

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.

Not without privacy laws, open standards...

[RanceJustice]

I'll open with a (perhaps the only) positive - Good on Apple for releasing the ResearchKit as open source. That said, there are still a LOT of barriers here.

First of all, while ResearchKit is open source, it is still predicated on iPhone sensors and the like, so in this way it is proprietary. Now, perhaps with time and effort it can be expanded to allow the same sort of thing to be done on Android devices, but as of right now it is effectively proprietary. However, this leads into a bigger issue: Standardization AND privacy for health data and metrics.

Right now we have a horrible platform when it comes to medical data and privacy. Despite HIPAA and the mandate to move to electronic medical records, these were horrible half measures that in many ways did more harm than good by not being specific enough. For instance, the idea between EMRs was that any doctor, hospital, pharmacy etc.. should be able to transfer and use data from any other. HA! Fat chance. Why? Because of our old friend that has fouled up accessible quality medical care for years - the unregulated profit motive, and its friend: proprietary lockdown!

EMR systems, even for a small office based practice, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking millions for hospitals or other larger centers or networks. And yet, they're all horribly modular and insular. Each EMR has their own proprietary data formats which are incompatible with modules from most other EMRs...or at best, require an expensive format-shifting module. For many physicians, EMRs are more trouble, not less - as they have to deal with tons of incompatible formats and halfassed implementations. I don't even want to get into the ICD-9 > ICD-10 > ICD-11 shift... All these systems do for now is leech money from providers and create a cottage industry of training, upgrades, and modules to sell. It does not improve patient care; at times it can be a threat to it.

The only proper solution will take an act of Congress, sadly. To require a single, completely open, unencumbered, universal, extensible, privacy respecting/encrypted, format for electronic medical records (and all facets thereof, from scheduling, to patient information, notes, etc..) - and then stipulate that all public insurance programs (ie Medicare etc..) will ONLY accept said format. Thus, you can use any EMR provider that you want, but they will all support the universal OpenEMR format. This is the only way to bring the original impetus behind switching to EMRs to fruition. I'd love to see the government mandate that the formats of GNU Health ( https://health.gnu.org/ ), the Free Software EMR would be used as a baseline for required standardization, as well as using a solution used GnuPG to help encrypt said records (patients have public and private keys as do physicians/practitioners, allowing complete control and traceability who has access to protected health info, who's making changes, and when). Until then, we shouldn't expect Apple or anyone else to have a myriad of applications that monitor and ostensibly involve themselves in the patient's health, yet report unknown and unknowable amounts of data in random forms to all sorts of individuals and somehow consider them to be in the best interest of the patient.

The other half of this equation is privacy; sadly something it seems we're losing more and more each day. Patient health data is already hugely mined and monetized; your pharmacy is selling your data to insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. These same industries are buying your browsing habits and what you search, to try to figure who has X condition that will cost them money. The amount of privacy that a user can give up more or less unknowingly (or cryptically hidden behind innocuous seeming requests and permissions) simply by installing an application for iOS/Android is enormous - expanding this to health any further is a nauseating prospect in my mind. Lets not forget that even when som

Re:charging

[BarbaraHudson]

i wonder how many device generations it will take before the apple watch just charges off of your body's ambient energy field.

Probably right before you die, so it can suck that last breath out of you. Then it will bring you directly to your iFuneral, since all the data about your death is already available, so no autopsy needed. People will be able to come and interact with simulations of you in your iCrypt that are generated from all the data they have on you out there. You are now an iPerson.

When your relatives tire of paying your simulacrums' upkeep, you will then be placed in the Apple Store and sold as a digital companion for $2.99.