Using a smartphone and Apple’s Research Kit software, researchers from Sage Bionetworks and the University of Rochester captured unprecedented levels of detail about the daily lives of Parkinson’s sufferers. The study, which began less than a year ago, was written up Thursday in Nature Scientific Data, and the data from 9,500 people — who participated in a detailed new informed consent process — was released to other researchers. The smartphone’s gyrometer and accelerometer were used to detect patients’ gait, the microphone to examine voice and muscle tone, the touch screen to test tremor and GPS to measure mobility, said John Wilbanks, one of the authors. “The breadth and richness of this data demand that it not be shut away,” said Sage Bionetworks President Stephen Friend. “By releasing this data widely, we hope to seed a community of researchers working collaboratively to unlock the knowledge within.”

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