Apple’s ResearchKit Gets Thousands of Participants within 24 Hours

Talk about a good launch.

Just a few days after Apple’s event, where the company promoted the health-focused features of the Apple Watch, particularly, ResearchKit—an open source tool that allows researchers to create applications that aims to solve diseases including asthma, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and Parkinson’s disease—more than 11,000 people have already signed up since Tuesday, stunning researchers at Stanford University.

Apple teamed up with Stanford Medicine and the University of Oxford to develop an app called MyHeart Counts, which evaluates a user’s activity and lifestyle, allowing researchers to identify patterns that /4/contribute to cardiovascular disease. Bloomberg Business reports that 11,000 people signed up on Tuesday for the cardiovascular study after Apple announced ResearchKit (11,000 people in less than 24 hours is something).

Alan Yeung, the medical director of Stanford Cardiovascular Health, tells Bloomberg Business that it normally takes a year and 50 medical centers around the country to enlist 10,000 people to a medical study. Yeung says that only the power of technology can achieve that feat. Using the MyHeart Counts app, Stanford researchers can encourage users to modify their lifestyles to improve heart health. Users will be asked to perform a “poor man’s street test,” which evaluates their current conditions.

Furthermore, more than 2,500 people have downloaded the Asthma Health app developed by Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell Medical College, and LifeMap. The app allows users to self-manage their asthma by avoiding areas where air quality is bad. Meanwhile, Apple’s mPower application, developed by the University of Rochester and Sage Bionetworks, amassed 5,589 users on Tuesday. The mPower app measures a user’s dexterity, balance, memory, and gait, allowing users to understand how various symptoms are connected to Parkinson’s disease.