ResearchKit's six-month-old universe is expanding again, thanks to three new healthcare projects that make use of the iPhone and Apple Watch.
Apple's enterprise-facing app platform is being used by researchers at Duke University, Johns Hopkins and the Oregon Health & Science University in new studies focused on autism, epilepsy and melanoma.
Duke University and Duke Health are partnering with China's Peking University in "Autism & Beyond," a study targeting parents of autistic children. The study uses the iPhone's camera to measure a child's reaction to videos played on the phone.
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The project is the latest in a series of HealthKit and ResearchKit studies conducted by Ricky Bloomfield, MD, director of Mobile Technology Strategy and an assistant professor in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Duke University. Bloomfield will be talking about this at next month's mHealth Summit just outside Washington D.C.
"Autism & Beyond combines well-established screening questionnaires with a new video technology that makes it possible to analyze the emotions of children so that we may one day be able to automate the screening for conditions such as autism and anxiety," Bloomfield said in a press release supplied by Apple. "ResearchKit enables us to put an entire medical study in a single app, reaching so many more people than we ever could before."
Out west at Portland's OHSU, researchers are using the iPhone camera to capture images of moles, and to document changes over time. They're expecting tens of thousands of participants around the world will send images, which will be used to create detection algorithms for future melanoma screening studies.
The project is a far cry from consumer-facing, off-the-shelf cancer detection apps that in the past have claimed to be able to detect melanoma from photographs – some of which have earned sharp rebukes from the Federal Trade Commission.
"Melanoma is the poster child for early detection. If we can identify melanomas earlier by creating a simple way for patients to share images of their moles we can learn more about the progression of the disease," Sancy Leachman, MD, PhD, OHSU's Dermatology chair and director of the Melanoma Research Program at the Knight Cancer Institute, said in the release. "Expanding our pool of research participants is a critical step in gaining the information we need. ResearchKit makes this easier than ever with the development of a simple iPhone app."
At Baltimore's Johns Hopkins, meanwhile, researchers are using sensors in the newly released Apple Watch to detect the onset and duration of seizures in people with epilepsy – the first such test of the Apple Watch in conjunction with ResearchKit. In the first phase of the project, a customized feature on the Apple Watch enables users to, with one touch, quickly trigger an app that captures accelerometer and heart rate sensor data and notifies a caregiver of a seizure. The EpiWatch app logs the seizures and the user's responses, while also tracking medication adherence and side effects.
"This new app, designed using ResearchKit, provides patients with interactive activities that help them manage their condition now, and opens the door to developing an app that can detect various seizure types and alert family and caregivers," Gregory Krauss, MD, a professor of Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in the release. "Now we have the opportunity to use technology to monitor seizures across the country and collect data in a totally new way."
These studies join a rapidly growing network designed to use ResearchKit's open-source framework to create a library of modules, active tasks and customizable surveys. Officials say more than 50 researchers have contributed active tasks since the platform was developed, targeting everything from hearing loss to cognition.
"We're honored to work with world-class medical institutions and provide them with tools to better understand diseases and ultimately help people lead healthier lives," Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of operations, said in a release. "In just six months, ResearchKit apps studying everything from asthma and diabetes to Parkinson's disease, are already providing insights to scientists around the world and more than 100,000 participants are choosing to contribute their data to advance science and medical research."
