We've had similar stuff like ResearchKit in existence for quite long. One of the most popular of such sites is patientslikeme.com .It and others did a great job around this, but usage is relatively rare.
The hard thing about such sites is:how do you incentivize people to contribute really personal information and do so on a regular basis(even if said action takes a relatively long time) ?
So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
> So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
A large marketing budget helps, e.g. see the video they launched with. Making it easy to use and frictionless would also help (no need to log into the website, no need to figure out how to sign a PDF or download a consent form or whatever the normal user flow is).
What concerns me is people gaming the apps; downloading them and filling them with fake data just to be malicious. You fix one problem and introduce another...
There's a huge opening here if pervasive sensors ever become consistent, calibrated, and easy-to-use-properly enough that they can supplement in-clinic data streams with at-home ones. This would open up the research contribution opportunity to people who cannot participate in clinical trials today due to distance from trial sites---this is something like 99% of the people who might feasibly be interesting to a clinical trial.
The big step in clinical research is the PIII trial and these are almost universally held up in enrollment. If this stuff was pervasive and trusty enough to be used in even a fraction of trial therapeutic areas it would revolutionize research and medicine in those indications.
All that to suggest the opportunity. I'm not exactly bullish on Research Kit tbh though. The "if" in my first sentence still appears to be a ways out and the kind of "throw the kitchen sink at it and average everything out in post" analytics championed by big data/machine learning of today doesn't fly well with the FDA.
I don't see the similarity with patientslikeme.com
Apple has created a UI toolkit to enable researchers to directly get data from participants via an app. All control is in the hands of the researcher creating the app.
And the app will be used for traditional research studies, the only difference is that participants enter data via their app.
The hard thing about such sites is:how do you incentivize people to contribute really personal information and do so on a regular basis(even if said action takes a relatively long time) ?
So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?