Is Your iPhone the Key to Curing Diabetes?

By Robin Raskin

Published Mar 18, 2015

Our mobile phones are changing the nature of medical research. While online health studies have existed for years, Apple’s latest innovation, ResearchKit, is bringing medical research front and center on your smallest screen.

What is ResearchKit? It is an open-source  iOS software platform that allows researchers and developers to build apps for patients. By monitoring, surveying, and logging healthy behaviors, apps using ResearchKit will help researchers further understand a variety of conditions.

Apps may ask you to fill out surveys or keep a log of what you eat, or take data from a fitness band or watch that measures your steps or heart rate. An app could be a way to log your blood sugar levels, either manually or with a peripheral attached to your iPhone. Other apps might track the strength of your breath to detect asthma, or tremors in your hands to monitor Parkinson’s. Apple is the pipe. The apps control what happens on either end.

Apple is not alone in its quest to gather large amounts of health data from us. Other websites including Patients Like Me and 23andMe have been gathering data from volunteers for years. With ResearchKit, we’re a step closer to making large-scale, data-driven medical experiments the norm.

Changing the Course of Medicine

With ResearchKit, researchers are able to reach a larger group of people with less effort and time than is traditionally needed. Since the kit launched on March 9, a record number of people have signed up to participate. Stanford University’s cardiovascular trial, for example, boasts 11,000 signups in the first week — a number they say would take at least a year to achieve otherwise.

There are many reasons to participate in a ResearchKit study. Altruists will do it to speed up the course of science. Those with self-interests will hope for a faster cure. Your data, combined with the data of others, can help medical research progress at a rate never seen before. That means a bigger knowledge base, which could lead to treatment innovations, new drug therapies, or even cures for some diseases. However, for now, participation in these studies is available only to Apple users, who may not be representative of the population as a whole.

If privacy concerns might keep you away, Apple and the scientific institutions assure us that they and their partners with have special anonymity-protecting protocols in place. Every participant’s data is coded, as in a regular study, without their name or identifying information. This information is then encrypted and kept on special servers. Apple and partner institutions have stated they will not sell your data or share it with third parties such as employers, insurance companies, or drug companies.

Consent forms are required in all of the apps we’ve looked at, and a simple questionnaire is included in most. Only you can see the data you’re sharing, and you are in control of which permissions you allow each individual app.

How to Get Involved

Interested in participating? Here are five studies that are accepting participants:

• Sage Bionetworks: mPower Parkinson’s study. This study is open to people with or without Parkinson’s disease. The app uses a mix of surveys and tasks to collect and track behaviors that indicate Parkinson’ progression. Participants must be at least 18 years old and live in the United States. Download the app here.
• Massachusetts General Hospital: GlucoSuccess. This app helps users manage their diabetes by looking at their diet, blood sugar levels, and physical activity. GlucoSuccess analyzes the data and provides insight into a user’s glucose control and food choices. The data the app collects also help researchers studying type 2 diabetes. To qualify for the study you must be over 18, a U.S. resident, and have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Download the app here.
• Mount Sinai Hospital: Asthma Mobile Health study. Like GlucoSuccess, the Asthma Mobile Health app combines a personalized service with the opportunity to participate in research. The app helps users gain control over their asthma by tracking trends, recording symptoms and inhaler use, and monitoring physical activity. It also provides medication reminders and air-quality updates based on your location. To participate you must be over 18, a U.S. resident, have an asthma diagnosis, and be taking prescribed asthma medication. Download the app here.
• Stanford Medicine: MyHeart Counts. This app uses an iPhone or an Apple Watch to track users’ physical activity as well as their cardiovascular risk. With this information, as well as user-added cholesterol and blood pressure levels, it calculates cardiovascular disease risk and “heart age.” Participants must be at least 18 and live in the United States.Download the app here.
• Sage Bionetworks: Share the Journey.The goal of this app is to better understand which symptoms women experience after breast cancer treatment. Users may be asked to complete a medical-history survey, perform tasks within the app, or fill out a symptom journal. To participate, you must be a woman between 18 and 80, and live in the United States. You do not need to have (or have had) breast cancer. Download the app here.