While technophiles across the world are still abuzz over yesterday’s unveiling of the new Apple smartwatch, the company broke some other news that might more be even more important.
Apple calls it “ResearchKit”, an open-source platform that will allow medical researchers to turn smartphones into medical diagnostic devices.
Many people are already used to the idea of wearable devices to do things like track exercise, or sleep. Jeff Williams is a senior vice president of operations at Apple. He told an audience yesterday that the key benefit of the ResearchKit platform is the potential to help doctors substantially increase the sample size for clinical studies.