Apple has found a new use for their iPhone - medicine. People had already created lots of apps, of course, but ResearchKit, due out next month, is the first Apple framework to make it easier. 

The framework allows new ways to create apps to track movement, take measurements, and record data and has three active modules: surveys, informed consent, and active tasks. Active tasks is the only one not intuitive - it means they can ask you to perform activities while the sensors are monitoring.

Most surprising: Unlike the usual Apple business model, ResearchKit is not part of their authoritarian culture and is open source.  In the modern world of omnipresent government spying, people are probably too jaded to believe they have privacy, but there is at least a pretense of it - you pick which data you want to share with which groups.

But plenty of people are lauding Apple for advancing medical research, which is not really true. They are making it easier to make apps, so the asthma app that exists will not lead to "greater insight into triggers for the disease" but it can help people avoid those areas. That is not medical research. And "potentially discover correlations between symptoms and daily actions such as diet or exercise" is the worst of all possible epidemiological travesties. Nutritionists will be using app data to advocate the latest diet craze. How long before the social sciences are using app survey results to make claims about 

The common belief is that more data is good, but only if it is properly controlled. That is hard to do with an app but they can't be faulted for trying. People tend to get overly excited about big company announcements, because it is validation if a corporation or the government embraces something, but people were excited about Google Wave also. If you are using one of the 900 HealthKit apps and want to share your data, this will make it a lot easier. However, like Wikipedia, it may be that the culture lends itself to a certain type of person and won't be representative enough to be valid for research purposes.