Apple Inc.’s ResearchKit Enables iPhone Parkinson’s Disease Study To Release Treasure Trove Of Data

Can the iPhone cure disease? That’s the hope behind a landmark study of Parkinson’s disease released Thursday that used Apple’s iPhone to track the progression of the disease among 9,500 people — without the researchers ever seeing a patient in person.

The study, conducted by nonprofit medical research group Sage Bionetworks and Rochester Medical Center with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is one of the first big applications of Apple’s ResearchKit, a set of software applications that make the iPhone a tool for medical research.