Getting Started with ResearchKit

Enter the era of medical research using mobile devices with the help of this guide on ResearchKit!

About This Book

• Create a simple clinical research app using most aspects of ResearchKit
• Build a simple survey with various data types with the results printed on the screen.
• A step-by-step guide introducing Apple's ResearchKit and techniques to incorporate it into various apps.

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at medical researchers with basic iOS coding knowledge and iOS developers looking to create clinical research apps.

What You Will Learn

• Learn to create customized consent form
• Get introduced to two backend services: a simple backend server using Sinatra and Sage Bridge
• Build a custom task (a conditional survey example) and a navigable task
• Get an Overview of ResearchKit's open source repository and App Core
• Interaction with the hardware of the device including the gyro and the motion sensors
• Learn the basics of this revolutionary technology
• Get introduced to the barebones app and learn to write your first code

In Detail

ResearchKit is an open source software development framework from Apple that lets you easily create mobile applications for clinical research studies. ResearchKit provides you the ability to orchestrate the administration of tasks and recording of the results. ResearchKit provides tasks in order to perform informed consent, active tasks, and surveys.

Starting with the basics of the ResearchKit framework, this books walks you through the steps of creating iOS applications that could serve as the basis of a clinical research mobile app.

This book will introduce readers to ResearchKit and how to turn your iPhone into into a clinical research tool. The book will start off by installing and building the research framework in line with the researcher's needs; during this, the reader will learn to embed ResearchKit in the application and create a small task.

After this, the book will go a little deeper into creating modules for surveys, consents, and so on. The book will also cover the various aspects of privacy and security with regard to participant data, and how to build dashboards for visualizing medical data and results in line with the researcher's requirements: data backends, JSON serialization and deserialization, and so on.

Readers will be able to fully utilize ResearchKit for medical research, will be able to get more and more patients to participate in their surveys, and will gain insights from the surveys using the dashboards created.

Style and approach

A hands-on guide with ample screenshots for you to follow and learn about ResearchKit. Each topic is explained sequentially and placed in context so that you can get a better understanding of every step in the process of creating clinical research apps.