Apple Launches Major Health Study

Apple is launching a new, wide-ranging medical research study that will analyze data from across its various devices to discover new connections across physical and mental health — including but not limited to cardiovascular health, neurological health, hearing, and sleep.

Why It Hits: It’s rare for a medical study to be this open-ended, let alone have access to more people than any health-focused study in history. By dissecting the relationships among various areas of health via wearables, headphones, and smartphones, Apple should have no problem realizing its ambition of becoming the leader in consumer-first health tech… with the devices that everyone already uses.

Behind the Study: The new “Apple Health Study” is ready to research… well… all of it.

• The minimum five-year-long study, done in participation with Brigham and Women’s Hospital (an affiliate of Harvard Medical School), will be available for Apple-device users to opt in via the Research app.
• Users will contribute their data and “answer periodic survey questions about their at-home life and habits,” per The Verge.
• The goal is to gather such a deep and wide dataset that it can be used to roll out various health-related hardware and software products, such as the new hearing-aid feature for AirPods.

Closing Thoughts: Considering that Apple’s first major medical study, the “Apple Heart Study,” which resulted in several new features for the Apple Watch, was able to recruit 400,000 willing participants (most medical studies are lucky to get a few thousand), the sample size for this cross-discipline study may be the broadest and most diverse of its kind ever conducted — taking into consideration people across ages, genders, ethnicities, and geographies.

According to lead researcher Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, that could help fill in many “information gaps” in current medical research.