As someone who is currently participating in an Apple/University of Michigan research study, I have a front row seat to a project that combines an iPhone, Apple Watch, and a blood pressure monitor to gather data. I have referred to this home-based technology as a wearable health ecosystem (WHE) (see: The Evolution of "Wearable Health Ecosystems" and Associated Partnerships). A recent article in the NYT delved into the emerging Apple role in medical research (see: Apple’s Reach Reshapes Medical Research). Below is an excerpt from it:
....[The] Harvard school [recently] announced an...ambitious women’s health study, one that aims to enroll a million women over a decade....To enroll in clinical trials, patients [normally] have often had to travel to medical centers to be briefed by researchers and fill out the study paperwork in person. Many studies also follow patients only intermittently, in periodic surveys and visits to hospitals.....[Apple] has developed a research app for iPhones — which participants can download from its app store — that is helping researchers quickly and easily recruit hundreds of thousands of study volunteers. Researchers at Stanford Medicine, who studied whether an app on the Apple Watch could detect an irregular heartbeat condition, were able to enroll more than 400,000 participants in just eight months....[D]octors...[do] not yet know whether monitoring people en masse through smartphones and consumer-wearable devices would significantly improve health outcomes....
Apple’s involvement in the research studies is the latest example of how the biggest tech companies are edging their way into the country’s $3.5 trillion health care market. The companies are making inroads in medicine in part by exploiting their scale, along with the technologies that have helped them dominate markets like cloud computing, search, productivity tools and consumer apps....Apple is striking out in a different direction [than other Big Tech companies]....[It has] has acquired health and wellness start-ups and hired prominent medical researchers.....Another study, by researchers at the University of Michigan, will collect noise level data from headphones and an iPhone app to examine how long-term sound exposure can affect hearing.
So what are we to make of this Apple initiative that takes advantage of IT to gather information for medical research from consumers? These devices allow researchers to gather data inexpensively and on a scale never imagined before. Parameters of such studies such as daily activity can't be fudged by the subjects. One legitimate criticism of these studies is that the subjects tends to be skewed toward more affluent consumers who can afford an iPhone and Apple Watch. This problem can be ameliorated partly by donating an Apple Watch and blood pressure monitor to the subjects as in the case of the MIPACT study. This provides a leg up for Apple when it wants to gather health data.
The most important question about these Apple collaborative studies is raised in the excerpt above: [D]octors...[do] not yet know whether monitoring people en masse through smartphones and consumer-wearable devices would significantly improve health outcomes. I am personally very optimistic about such studies. I think that researchers will rapidly come to understand how to design them to take advantage of the data gathered by wearable health ecosystems in subjects' homes.
Comments