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

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:

https://twitter.com/wilbanks/status/575125345977810945

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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Technology for Good – episode six

In episode 6 of the Technology for Good hangout we had lots to talk about, and I had Mr Chris Adams on with me to co-host. It was, of course, the week of IBM’s Pulse conference, as well as the Mobile World Congress, so there were lots of very exciting stories in the Mobile, Internet of Things, and security spaces, amongst others. The links to the stories are below.

As always, if you know of any stories you think we should cover, or someone we should be talking to, feel free to get in touch (@tomraftery on Twitter, or tom at redmonk.com on good old-fashioned email!).

And, here as promised, are the stories which made the cut for episode 6 of the Technology for Good hangout:

Intro

IBM Pulse

Security

Mobile

Heavy Industry

America

Misc

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Smartphone energy management – at last there is an app for that!

Carat

The World Bank issued a report yesterday showing that the number of mobile phone subscriptions in use worldwide, both pre-paid and post-paid, has now reached over 6 billion.

The report went on to reveal that more than 30 billion mobile applications, or “apps,” were downloaded in 2011 alone – these apps extend the capabilities of phones, for instance to become mobile wallets, navigational aids or price comparison tools. However the apps also have a cost associated with their use – they drain the phone’s battery.

Carat - smartphone energy managament

Some of these apps are energy hogs – they require a lot of energy to run, and so they drain the phone’s battery quickly (maybe they are legitimately using the camera, the GPS radio, and the 3G network simultaneously). Other apps have bugs in them whereby they may not properly close out battery use after a particular function and they continue to drain the battery. Until now, there has been no way to identify which apps were the ones draining your battery’s charge.

I have written a couple of times here before wondering why there was no energy management app for smart phones. Now there is – Carat.

Carat has been developed by a very small team at the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMP Lab) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.

The app is free and available for both the iOS and Android platforms. And the client-side code has been uploaded to Github, where anyone can download it, and if they have the development chops, potentially fix any issues they find, or even improve on the app.

As every Smartphone owner knows, battery life is a massive problem. Carat discovered just how big a problem when TechCrunch wrote a piece about the app a few weeks ago. Carat had estimated that they’d pick up an extra 10,000 users as a result of the article. Instead 250,000 people installed the app on their phones and Carat had to scramble to deal with the massive, influx of data.

As can be seen from the image above, Carat gives you advice on ways to get longer life from the battery in your smartphone by identifying Battery Hogs (apps that use a lot of energy), apps with energy bugs and advising on how much extra battery life you will save by re-starting or killing the app.

Carat also reports your J-Score:
Carat J-Score

The J-Score is “the percentile battery life you see relative to all other devices being measured by Carat”, so the J-Score of 54 reported for my phone means my expected battery life is better than 54% of Carat’s users.

One thing to be aware of is that because Carat needs a certain threshold of application usage before it can report accurately on your apps, it typically takes a weeks usage before it starts advising you on how to get better battery life for your device.

Speaking to Carat developer Adam Oliner last week he informed me that some of the next steps for the app will be to publish api’s so that app developers will have better access to the energy consumption info of their applications.

What is interesting about this app is that it was developed as a research project, and not by one of the Smartphone Endpoint Management providers. You’d have thought saving their customers money and reducing their emissions (through using less energy), while keeping their employees more productive (by prolonging the battery life of their smartphones) would have been a no-brainer.

Perhaps, now that it has been shown that this is possible, we’ll see more of these types of apps emerge.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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

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