The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has ushered in a new era in digital health care with two pioneering collaborations involving Google [X] Life Sciences (GLS) and Apple Inc.’s recently released ResearchKit framework—software that enables patients to join medical research studies using their iPhones.
Through an academic partnership with GLS, medical and MD/PhD students at the Icahn School of Medicine will have an unparalleled opportunity to participate in research programs at GLS’s laboratory facilities in Silicon Valley starting this year. GLS will choose the students and integrate them into one of four research areas—computational biology, translational research, clinical science, or physiometric sensor development—where they will work as full-time members of a GLS research team.
Separately, the Icahn School of Medicine and LifeMap Solutions have launched a large-scale medical research study of people with asthma that enables them to participate by downloading the Asthma Health app onto their iPhones from Apple’s App store.
The free Asthma Research app is the first in a series of disease-related medical research apps that Mount Sinai plans to develop using Apple’s new ResearchKit framework. The open-source software was designed to help physicians and scientists gather patient data more frequently, more accurately, and more cost effectively than they have been able to do during traditional medical research studies.