Apple has announced the launch of the Apple Health Study. It will cover topics such as activity, aging, cardiovascular health, circulatory health, cognitive function, hearing, menstrual health, metabolic health, mobility, neurological health, respiratory health, and sleep. Users who agree to participate will provide their data and take periodic surveys about their home life and habits.
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The virtual study will appear in the Research app. The company will collect a wide range of data to try to discover new connections between different aspects of health, both physical and mental. The study is being conducted in collaboration with a branch of Harvard Medical School. The first phase is designed to last five years, with the possibility of further extension.
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The study’s goals seem vague at first glance, as its scope and potential scale are much broader than traditional clinical trials. This kind of broad-based study of various aspects of health could help create more proactive features. One example is the new hearing test feature in AirPods. According to Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, the feature was inspired by Apple’s hearing research. It could one day help understand whether early hearing loss could increase the risk of cognitive decline.
«We use these studies not only to learn, but also to guide and inform our decisions about what to add to the product roadmap,” Desai said, adding that the company has decided not to implement features that received negative reviews from researchers.
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Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who will serve as the principal investigator for the Apple Health Study, believes that traditional studies often take too long to reach their conclusions before they become applicable to everyday life. “They pick a population and a topic to study on day one, and then they’re stuck with those decisions for potentially decades, even if the field itself has changed in the meantime,” he says.
MacRae believes that access to a “massive, diverse cohort” — in this case, anyone with an Apple device — opens up the possibility of accelerating discovery and progress: “The more diverse and broad the age range, demographics, and other criteria, the better. We can identify an initial signal, test it, validate it, and then link it to more factors. The more people we have in a study, the more data we have, and suddenly we’re able to dramatically accelerate the pace of research.”
The company’s first research project, the Apple Heart Study, recruited 400,000 participants. Most traditional studies work with much smaller samples and cannot track participants over long periods. Scaling up the study opens up new opportunities to uncover previously unknown patterns.
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The Apple Health Study’s size could help researchers fill in information gaps. One problem with traditional clinical trials is that they tend to include a narrower sample of participants. For example, if a health study primarily involves young, white men, the results may not apply to women, children, older adults, or people of other ethnicities.
The researchers aren’t expecting results quickly. “I wouldn’t expect anything this year, simply because it would be scientifically impossible,” Desai said, citing the Apple Watch’s sleep apnea monitoring feature, which took about five years to develop.