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Apple launches ResearchKit – secure, private, open source medical research

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ResearchKit

Apple announced a new initiative at its Spring Forward event yesterday – ResearchKit.

What is ResearchKit? Apple’s SVP of Operations, Jeff Williams, described it as a framework for medical researchers to create and deploy mobile apps which collect and share medical data from phone users (with their permission), and share it with the researchers.

Why is this important? Previously it has proven difficult for research organisations to secure volunteers for research studies, and the data collected from such studies is often collected, at best, quarterly.

With this program, Apple hopes to help researchers more easily attract volunteers, and collect their information far more frequently (up to once a second), yielding far richer data.

The platform itself launches next month, but already there are 5 apps available, targeting Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, and breast cancer. These apps have been developed by medical research organisations, in conjunction with Apple.

The success of this approach can be seen already in this tweet:

I downloaded mPower, the app for Parkinson’s to try it out, but for now, they are only signing up people who are based in the US.

As well as capturing data for the researchers, mPower also presents valuable information to the user, tracking gait and tremor, and seeing if they improve over time, when combined with increased exercise. So the app is a win both for the research organisations, and for the users too.

Apple Does Not See Your Data

Apple went to great pains to stress that the user is in complete control over who gets to see the data. And Apple themselves doesn’t ever get to see your data.

This is obviously a direct shot at Google, and its advertising platform’s need to see your data. Expect to hear this mantra repeated more and more by Apple in future launches.

This focus on privacy, along with Apple’s aggressive stance on fixing security holes, and defaulting to encryption on its devices, is becoming a clear differentiator between Apple and Android (and let’s face it, in mobile, this is a two horse race, for now).

ResearchKit Open Source

Finally, Williams concluded the launch by saying Apple wants ResearchKit on as many devices as possible. Consequently, Apple are going to make ResearchKit open source. It remains to see which open source license they will opt for.

But, open sourcing ResearckKit is a very important step, as it lends transparency to the privacy and security which Apple say is built-in, as well as validating Apple’s claim that they don’t see your data.

And it also opens ResearchKit up to other mobile platforms to use (Android, Windows, Blackberry), vastly increasing the potential pool of participants for medical research.

We have documented here on GreenMonk numerous times how Big Data, and analysis tools are revolutionising health care.

Now we are seeing mobile getting in on the action too. And how.

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Smartphone energy management – when will there be an app for that?

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Mobile energy saving app?

I wrote a post last week about mobile endpoint management applications and their potential to extend smartphone battery life. It seems it was a prescient piece given the emergence this week of a study from Purdue University and Microsoft Research showing how energy is used by some smartphone applications [PDF].

The study indicates that many free, ad-supported applications expend most of their energy on serving the ads, as opposed to on the application itself. As an example, the core part of the free version of Angry Birds on Android uses only 18% of the total app energy. Most of the rest of the energy is used in gathering location, and handset details for upload to the ad server, downloading the ad, and the 3G tail.

This behaviour was similar in other free apps, such as Free Chess, NYTimes which were tested on Android and an energy bug found in Facebook causing the app to drain power even after termination, was confirmed fixed in the next version released (v1.3.1).

The researchers also performed this testing on Windows Mobile 6.5 but in the published paper, only the Android results are discussed.

Inmobi’s Terence Egan pushed back against some of the findings noting that

In one case, the researchers only looked at the first 33 seconds of usage when playing a chess game.

Naturally, at start up, an app will open communications to download an ad. Once the ad has been received, the app shouldn?t poll for another ad for some time.

Hver the time it take to play a game of chess (the computer usually beats me in 10 minutes) a few ad calls are dwarfed by the energy consumption of the screen, the speakers, and the haptic feedback.

Although, in a tacit admission that this is a potential issue further down in his post he lists handy best practices for developers to make “ad calls as battery friendly as possible”

The iPhone iOS operating system wasn’t looked at in this study at all but it is not immune from these issues either. And, in fact, reports are emerging now that the new iPad is unable to charge when certain energy intensive apps are running.

While it is important to remind developers of the need for green coding, not all coders will heed the advice and there will always be rogue apps out there draining your smartphone’s battery.

And this is not just a consumer issue – for enterprises it is important to keep the organisation’s smartphone owners happy, connected, and above all, productive. A drained battery is ultimately a disconnected, unproductive and frustrated employee. Reducing a phone’s energy use is, obviously a sustainability win too.

Mobile endpoint management applications could use technology similar to the eprof software used in the study, to identify bugs or rogue applications on phones. This could be reported back to a central database to alert users (and app developers) of issues found.

With more and more apps coming on the market, this is an issue which is only going to become more pronounced. Someone is going to come out with a decent mobile energy management app sooner, rather than later. It will be interesting to see where it comes from.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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Apple just got a whole lot Greener!

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Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Photo credit hildgrim

Like Symantec, Apple too have a significant Green story that they are not telling – and it just got a lot Greener!

Why do I say they have a Green story in the first place? Aren’t they just constantly exhorting us to buy their products? How is that sustainable?

Well, let me start by making a confession – I am an Apple fanboy. I love their kit. I bought my first computer (a used Apple Mac SE FDHD) back in 1989 and ever since then, even when I worked as a Windows Sysadmin, my own personal machine has always been a Mac.

When Apple brought out their 3G iPhone, I bought one of those too. And I loved it. The device was, without doubt, a defining moment in the history of mobile phones. And this is where Apple’s Green story started to become more obvious to me. My previous phones had, for almost all the previous 12 years, been Nokia’s. The average lifetime of my Nokia handsets was typically less than a year (usually 6-9 months). A new mobile would come out with the next killer feature, and I’d shell out.

iPhone App Store

iPhone App Store

However, with the iPhone 3G, Apple kept upgrading the operating system, adding more and more functionality, and making it freely available for download directly onto the phone. This meant I was able to get all the new functionality, without having to buy any new hardware. This is a definite dematerialisation win – it takes a lot less carbon to download a new operating system, than to buy a new phone.

At the same time, Apple launched the App store for the iPhone. This meant you could go to a library of programs written specifically for the iPhone and download one directly for your mobile if it had functionality (or a game!) you wanted. This ability to easily extend the functionality of the devices at will, also meant they tended to have a longer working life.

When I did finally upgrade from the iPhone 3G, to the iPhone 4 (2 years later), I had a buyer already lined up for the iPhone 3G, so it lives on (and is still much loved by its new owner!).

Similarly, Apple’s Mac hardware is hugely desirable. Every one of my Mac desktops and laptops has been passed on after I have finished with them. Macs are always in demand, even second hand. I never have a problem finding someone to take a used Mac off my hands. On the other hand, I have a Sony Viao laptop from 2007 that I couldn’t give away!

So why do I say Apple just got a lot Greener?

Because Apple recently announced that it is now creating a Mac App store. This is a superb move. As of Oct 20th 2010 Apple had 7bn application downloads from its existing iPhone app store (it launched in mid-2008). For many reasons, the Mac app store will be highly unlikely to have as many downloads in the same period of time, but even if it shifts a mere 7m apps from being physically created and shipped, to being simply downloaded, that is a big carbon saving.

This is not just good news for Apple though – I mentioned here a while back that Adobe were charging people more for a downloadable copies of their software than for shipped physical copies of the same software! This obviously makes no sense but is a result of vagaries of EU taxation which Adobe neglected to factor into their pricing and as a result they are actively encouraging people to purchase physical copies of their products!

In the (albeit highly unlikely) event that Adobe were to sell their software through the Mac app store, then they could hand off the responsibility for worrying about EU tax and pricing issues to Apple.

Will Microsoft and other large vendors let Apple let Apple sell their software for them? They’d be crazy not to.

By going with the mac App store they get a software shop delivered straight onto every Mac owner’s desktop (you can be sure the Mac app store will be part of the desktop with OS X Lion when it ships, as well as an update for all other systems). They also get a ready-made way to reduce the carbon emissions (and media, packaging and freight costs) associated with every software sale!

Now Apple have a history of being market leaders (witness their creation recently of the tablet market with the launch of their iPad). There is no doubt that other vendors will quickly follow Apple’s lead in creating online stores for their software – does this mean the era of software being shipped by courier or through the post is coming to an end? Let’s hope so.

All that and we haven’t even talked about what iTunes did for music CDs or what the Apple TV will do to rid the world of pesky, scratch-prone, physical DVDs!

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British Gas launch version 2 of their iPhone app – nice but non-inclusive!

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British Gas iPhone app

British Gas announced recently that they had updated their iPhone app to version 2.

The original application, which was downloaded over 100,000 times, helped customers monitor energy use and submit meter readings to avoid estimated bills. In June alone over 18,000 meter readings were submitted using the app.

With the new version customers can

  • view their account balance
  • see their last bill amount
  • check when payment is due and
  • view graphs of their personal energy consumption of the past 24 months
British Gas iPhone app - electricity

British Gas iPhone app - electricity

Benjamin Braun, Head of Online Services, at British Gas said:

More customers already contact us over the web than by telephone and with these new features, we expect that our App will quickly become the main way that many of our iPhone customers will manage their British Gas account.

When I read this I wondered why, if more people are contacting British Gas over the web than by phone, they decided to develop an application for the iPhone. Why not a mobile site which works across all devices. I reached out to their spokesperson David Outhwaite and I asked him if there were plans to develop a similar app for competing platforms like Android or better yet a mobile website which would work across all platforms.

David replied that

Our focus has been the iphone as that is the device from which we receive the vast majority of contact to our website. No current plans [to develop for other platforms]

The fact that this application has been so successful for British Gas shows that people have an appetite for interacting with their energy related information. Consequently, I found David’s response very disappointing.

Although I do own an iPhone, and I like what British Gas are doing with this app, I feel they are doing their non-iPhone owning customers a huge disservice by not providing them with similar functionality. Especially when you consider that the iPhone OS only commands 14% of the mobile operating system market share, what about the other 86% of British Gas’ customers?

It wouldn’t be hard to develop a mobile site which served iPhones, Android devices, and other smartphones equally well.

Hopefully British Gas will have a change of heart and produce a more inclusive mobile site soon.

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