Health IT

ResearchKit, meet your Android cousin: ResearchStack

There are plans for a publicly available beta test of ResearchStack for the start of 2016, according to project's website.

The Apple-less among us who are interested in applying digital health technologies to healthcare and life science research may soon have a response to ResearchKit. A Robert Wood Johnson backed collaboration between  Cornell Tech, the nonprofit group Open mHealth, and Android development firm Touchlabare developing an Android version called ResearchStack, according to iMedicalApps.

Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science and Public Health at Cornell Tech and Cornell Medical College respectively, the co-founder of Open mHealth, promoting an open standard for mobile health data is heading up the project.

It’s an exciting development for the use of digital health technologies to support medical research because there are more Android users than iOS network users. What’s more, this will exponentially increase the number of applications to support medical research.

A summary of the technology and its implications, can be found on the ResearchStack website.

“…an overriding goal of ResearchStack is to help developers and researchers with existing apps on iOS more easily adapt those apps for Android. Though the correspondence of features between the two SDKs isn’t one-to-one, the two SDKs will offer enough shared functionality and a common framework and naming scheme to greatly speed up adaptation of ResearchKit apps to Android (and ResearchStack apps to iOS) and the procedural aspects of running a study on a new platform (such as IRB approval and secure connectivity with a data collection backend).

There are plans for a publicly available beta test for the start of 2016, according to the website. Still, Google is curiously absent from the team, although the author of the iMedical Apps posts suspects the company could be operating behind the scenes.

According to a recent New York Times article, one of the projects ResearchStack will support is Mole Mapper. The app, developed by the Oregon Health and Science University, will be used for a melanoma study. The goal is to develop a more sensitive detection algorithms to assess changes and growth in moles.

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