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:

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.

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.