Back in March 2015, Apple Inc announced ResearchKit, a novel open-source framework intended to help medical researchers to easily create apps for medical studies. Since then there have been a number of mobile apps created to make use of this framework and a few have now made it into the literature, “Back on Track”: A Mobile App Observational Study Using Apple’s ResearchKit Framework DOI was designed to help understand decision making in patients with acute anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures. The Asthma Mobile Health Study, a large-scale clinical observational study using ResearchKit DOI enabled prospective collection of longitudinal, multidimensional data (e.g., surveys, devices, geolocation, and air quality) in a subset of users over the 6-month study period. The Mole Mapper Study, mobile phone skin imaging and melanoma risk data collected using ResearchKit DOI Skin cancer research is particularly amenable to this approach, as phone cameras enable self-examination and documentation of mole abnormalities that may signal a progression towards melanoma.

At the end of last year the RSC CICAG ran a one day meeting looking a mobile apps in chemistry. With the Spring meeting of the ACS in San Francisco starting today I'd be interested in hearing about any new Mobile apps for chemistry. You can download the app for the meeting here.

The ACS Mobile Meeting Application is your full-featured guide to manage your experience at the 253rd ACS National Meeting & Exposition in San Francisco, CA (April 2-6, 2017).

You can browse mobile science apps for iOS here.

 

ResearchKit is an open-source framework that allows researchers and developers to create powerful apps for medical research.

The Parkinson app is one of the first five apps built using ResearchKit.

mPower is a unique iPhone application that uses a mix of surveys and tasks that activate phone sensors to collect and track health and symptoms of Parkinson Disease (PD) progression - like dexterity, balance or gait. The goal of this app is to learn more about the variations of PD, and to improve the way we describe these variations and to learn how mobile devices and sensors can help us to measure PD and its progression to ultimately improve the quality of life for people with PD.

The initial results have now been published Scientific Data 3, Article number: 160011 (2016) ​DOI, with around 15,000 people contributed data to the study.

 

A limited number of cancer patients at the King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will have access to an Apple Watch app developed by tech company Medopad to support their chemotherapy.

More details here.

The rheumatology department at King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has adopted a smartphone app to support outpatients living with chronic arthritis.

 

There continue to be announcements about Apple's medical research software platform, an interview with Steve Friend gives some insights into how ResearchKit and HealthKit were born.

More recently

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced its Health Cloud and Watson cognitive computing capabilities will support health data entered by customers in iOS apps using Apple's ResearchKit and HealthKit frameworks. The move, which complements IBM's new Watson Health business unit, will arm medical researchers with a secure, open data storage solution, as well as access to IBM's most sophisticated data analytics capabilities.

ResearchKit is an Open Source framework developed by Apple intended to be used for building apps for medical research.

There is more information here

and the GitHub repository is here

To get the latest stable release

git clone -b stable https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit.git

Ars Technica will be reviewing in detail over the next few days.

I've added ResearchKit to the MobileScience site.