Apple ResearchKit update helps medical pros annotate PDFs| Tech News

Accessing data to further medical research is becoming increasingly easier and more user friendly with the introduction of Apple’s ResearchKit 2.0.

iOS 12 brings a new interface and a plethora of active tasks to ResearchKit, as Apple detailed in a Wednesday blog post. Apple recently announced that the ResearchKit user and developer community will have early access to changes made and have the ability to suggest changes within the release.

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The UI now follows the most current iOS style, with anchored footers featuring “skip” and “cancel” buttons to create a more intuitive navigation experience, the post said. PDFs will now be easier to edit and turn into shareable documents as well. Additionally, a quick repetition of a block of text creates speech transcription that is easily edited.

According to the post, developers can evaluate participant’s hearing with the inclusion of background noise with Speech in Noise. The introduction of an Amsler Grid allows participants to assess any vision problems or areas of distortion.

Apple also reported that it’s adding dBHL Tone Audiometry to ResearchKit, which the post described as a “task that uses the Hughson Westlake method for determining the hearing threshold level of a user in the dB HL scale.” As part of facilitating that, Apple has open-sourced calibration data for AirPods.

A new environmental SPL meter can record the background noise levels a user is experiencing during an activity to make sure they are doing so in the correct environment.

The introduction of ResearchKit and HealthKit have gone a long way to help democratize medical research and medical data among iPhone users. These new ResearchKit features could help medical experts better study user behavior and glean better data for future analysis.

If you want to download the iOS 12 Beta, read how here.

The big takeaways for tech leaders:

• ResearchKit users now have the opportunity to give feedback on changes being made to each version prior to the official release.
• A new UI and increased ease of PDF editing and annotating makes using ResearchKit easier than ever for medical professionals.

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