The ResearchKit Health Projects

A physician’s guiding principle is “First, do no harm.” As a result, new treatments for diseases must be tested thoroughly, preferably in double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials, before they can be approved and then prescribed to patients. For trial results to be considered statistically significant, a large number of study participants are needed, and typically recruiting enough participants with a given disease or with susceptibility to the disease is difficult. Progress in translating research into clinical treatments is slower than it could be because of this bottleneck in the process of conducting clinical trials.