Getting Started with ResearchKit

Edward Cessna, Dhanush Balachandran

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781785889172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Languages
• Index: Computer Science

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.

Getting Started with ResearchKit

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Table of Contents

Getting Started with ResearchKit

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Getting Started

What is ResearchKit?

Privacy

Identification, authentication, and authorization

Informed consent

Relationship with HealthKit

Features not provided by ResearchKit

The anatomy of a ResearchKit-based application

Summary

2. ResearchKit Hello World

Hello World App

Create project

Checkout ResearchKit from GitHub

Import ResearchKit

Enable Data Protection

Hello World!

Introducing Softwareitis

Summary

3. Building Surveys

ResearchKit object model

Tasks and steps

Task view controller and results

Building surveys

Instruction step

Question step

Form step

Considerations for real-world surveys

BONUS: Appearance customization

Summary

4. ResearchKit Informed Consent

Consent document

Visual consent step

Consent review step

Consent sharing

Consent process

Obtaining results

Summary

5. Active Tasks

Active tasks

Short walk task

Sample code

Results

Screenshot

Two-finger tapping interval task

Sample code

Results

Screenshot

Fitness task

Sample code

Results

Screenshot

Spatial memory task

Sample Code

Results

Screenshot

Sustained phonation task

Sample code

Results

Screenshot

Data formats

Pedometer data

Location data

Device motion data

Accelerometer data

Audio data

Summary

6. Navigable and Custom Tasks

Navigable ordered tasks

Custom tasks

Summary

7. Backend Service

Why is backend service needed?

Security and privacy

Introduction to Sage Bionetworks and the Bridge service

Introduction to sample ResearchKit backend server

Serialization of task results

The serialization of survey responses

Serialization of file results

Summary

8. Where to Go from Here

Restoring tasks

Graphs and charts

Pie chart

Line graph

Discrete graph

Scheduling

Cron expressions

APCSchedule Expression

Safeguarding Data-in-transit

A theoretical architecture for ResearchKit-based applications

Presentation layer

Business logic layer

Data substrate layer

Online ResearchKit resource

Summary

Index

Getting Started with ResearchKit

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: February 2016

Production reference: 1020216

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-917-2

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Authors

Dhanush Balachandran

Edward Cessna

Reviewers

Oliver Gepp

Andreas Griesser

Commissioning Editor

Veena Pagare

Acquisition Editor

Kevin Colaco

Content Development Editor

Sumeet Sawant

Technical Editor

Danish Shaikh

Copy Editor

Vibha Shukla

Project Coordinator

Shweta H Birwatkar

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Mariammal Chettiyar

Graphics

Disha Haria

Production Coordinator

Nilesh Mohite

Cover Work

Nilesh Mohite

About the Authors

Dhanush Balachandran has a vast experience in creating mobile apps for healthcare industry that include several ResearchKit apps. He was the lead iOS engineer at Jiff, a healthcare start-up and later worked on ResearchKit-based apps for leading institutions. Currently, he is an iOS engineer at DJI. He is also the founder & CEO of mobile app startup, Sortly.

Edward Cessna is the software engineering director for Y Media Labs, a digital agency in Northern California that creates mobile applications. He has three decades of software engineering experience—ranging from embedded software providing cryptographic services to a multitude of iOS applications. He has been working with iOS since its first public release in July 2008. He has managed the development effort for a number of ResearchKit-based applications for leading research institutions.

About the Reviewers

Oliver Gepp is a senior software engineer at Zühlke Group, Switzerland with a strong focus on mobile apps. He has a diploma in media computer science from the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. Most of his projects are in the insurance and banking business, where he covers the whole application life cycle such as business analysis, development, and testing. His passion is developing mobile apps for the iOS platform not only in Swift and Objective-C, but also with cross platform technologies such as Xamarin.

Andreas Griesser is leading the business development at Zühlke Group, Switzerland in the area of LabScience, Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology. He holds a master's degree in telecommunication, mathematics, and informatics from the Technical University of Graz, Austria and a PhD in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland (ETH). During his career, he was involved in research projects of real-time three-dimensional scanning, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), and medical image analysis.

Under his current activities at Zühlke in the healthcare sector, he focuses on topics such as digital transformation and connected devices—not only on a technical level, but also with a business-related perspective.

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Table of contents

• Getting Started with ResearchKit