Chapter 1. Getting Started

On March 9, 2015, Apple introduced ResearchKit, a software framework that facilitates the development of health and clinical-based research applications for iOS. Doctors and researchers will be able to collect larger quantities of data frequently and with greater accuracy through the applications built with ResearchKit. The ultimate goal is to increase the research community's knowledge on diseases that could potentially lead to medical breakthroughs in the treatment of the studied diseases.

In conjunction with ResearchKit's announcement, Apple announced and released five ResearchKit-based applications. These applications are as follows:

1. Asthma Health: This is developed by Mount Sinai in order to study asthma triggers and help participants self-manage their asthma. This application makes heavy use of ResearchKit's survey capabilities and custom tasks.
2. mPower: This is developed by the University of Rochester and Sage Bionetworks in order to study the variability in the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. This application utilizes ResearchKit's two-finger tapping, short walk, spatial-span memory, and custom tasks.
3. GlucoSuccess: This is developed by Massachusetts General Hospital to study how diet, physical activity, and medications affect blood glucose levels for participants with type 2 diabetes. This application utilizes ResearchKit's survey capability and custom tasks.
4. Share the Journey: This is developed by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Penn Medicine, and Sage Bionetworks to study the long-term effects of chemotherapy used in the treatment of breast cancer. This application utilizes ResearchKit's survey and custom tasks.
5. MyHeart Counts: This is developed by Stanford Medicine and the University of Oxford in order to study how a participant's lifestyle affects the risk of cardiovascular disease. This application utilizes ResearchKit's fitness-check task and surveys, and custom tasks.

The five initial ResearchKit-based applications shared similar user experience. Using a common application core that's independent of ResearchKit, these applications had a common on-boarding process to enroll new participants in the study, an activity list to present tasks that the researchers wish the participants to carry out, and a dashboard to present the results of the previously carried out tasks. Additionally, these applications used the same backend service to establish accounts, download task schedules and surveys, and upload the collected data in a secure manner.

Apple has open sourced all of the initial ResearchKit applications, and the application core that provides additional services and capabilities beyond these features of ResearchKit.

Note

Links to the source code, documentation, and other information can be found on www.apple.com/researchkit and www.researchkit.org; the source code is hosted directly on GitHub at https://github.com/researchkit.

The open source applications serve as an example for researchers to undertake the development of their own ResearchKit-based applications. As examples, there are differences between these applications and the ones available from the App Store. In general, copyright material has been removed along with the cryptographic credentials that enable the applications to upload data to the researcher's servers.