Many people already use their phones to track health-related info like their daily steps, their food intake, their weight, and more. And today, Apple announced that a new tool called ResearchKit will make it easy for researchers to use this data to study breast cancer and heart disease, among other conditions.
“With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, said in a press release. “ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before.”
This is pretty big since before, researchers may only have had access to study subjects within their community. "Access to more diverse patient-reported health data will help us learn more about long-term after-effects of cancer treatments and provide us with a better understanding of the breast cancer patient experience," Patricia Ganz, M.D., director of cancer prevention and control research at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in the release. (UCLA is one of the institutions that's already built an app to work within ResearchKit. Other diseases with their own research-related apps include asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease.)
Before you freak out, know that you'll have to give ResearchKit permission to access your data if you want to participate in studies—and Apple says you'll be able to control which data is shared. It's a little unclear right now how researchers would recruit you to participate in a study, but the announcement begs the question: Would people actually opt in to sharing their data and/or responding to surveys for medical research on their phones? Let us know what you'd do if you had a condition being studied: