Tech company Apple has announced plans to launch a new medical research data-sharing platform. This is to be called ResearchKit.
The new platform will be available to researchers conducting large-scale medical studies. Here iPhone apps will allow users who opt to participate in scientific studies to share their health data with scientists. This will make it much easier for scientists to recruit and track study participants.
Apple has already issued five disease-specific apps built using its ResearchKit platform. These apps can be used to study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular health, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease. The ResearchKit framework allows interested researchers to track disease signs by sensors that are on the phone or the Apple watch.
Commenting on this, Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president of operations, told the science website Nature: “There are hundreds of millions of iPhone owners out there who would gladly contribute.”
Apple are keen to stress that they will have no access to the medical data. However, there could be other ethical issues. Nir Eyal, a medical ethicist at Harvard University, told The Verge that issues could arise if participants are not fully knowledgeable of the risks involved with participating in a study. In addition, there could be concerns about and making sure that data is truly secure once shared. Eyal adds: “Everything depends on the quality of the anonymization. If the data can be re-identified, then subjects are exposed to some invasions of privacy.”
Apple to release ResearchKit as an open-source platform in April 2015, so developers will be able to create their own apps that can tap into the network. Would you be happy to use this platform? Please use the comments section below to share your thoughts.
