Apple announced it is collaborating with Brigham and Women's Hospital to launch the Apple Health Study, which will use various data from Apple devices to help predict, detect and manage physical and mental health and overall wellbeing. 

The study will use the association between data to examine the relationship between various areas of health, such as how exercise affects sleep and vice versa or mental health's influence on heart rate. 

"The Apple Health Study really breaks down the boundaries between different parts of physiology and biology in a way that I think acknowledges the reality of human nature, where we know that all of our systems are connected to each other," Dr. Calum MacRae, cardiologist and principal investigator of the Apple Health Study at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told MobiHealthNews. 

"They respond together. They change together. They are affected by the environment together. And so for us to have the opportunity to look across a much broader swath of health was really exciting," MacRae said.

Data for the study will be collected via Apple devices – including iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods – and third-party devices. 

The study will examine the connection between activity, menstrual health, circulatory health, cognition, cardiovascular health, aging, metabolic health, cognition, mobility, respiratory health, neurologic health, hearing, mental health, sleep and more.

Researchers will be able to quantify how somebody exercises, for example, and use that exercise as the metadata for another set of parameters they are studying the association between.

"We've deliberately, and Apple has been very transparent about this, created a platform that allows very dynamic and adaptive approaches to how you answer questions and how you even take principled approaches to recruitment, to engagement," MacRae said.

In conjunction with the Apple team, the researchers are considering how to accelerate the insights generated from the data to give the results back to participants quickly.  

"What we're really trying to do is say, 'OK, here's an initial signal. Let's follow that signal up in a very rapid fashion with the right number of individuals, get insight, and give it back to people in real time.' And our goal is to try and iterate in three- to six-month cycles," MacRae said.   

"I can't give feedback on, let's say, an aging phenotype or a metabolic phenotype in that timeline," he said. "On the other hand, I can give feedback on a sleep phenotype, a joint phenotype or an exercise phenotype much more quickly."

MacRae emphasized that participants' data is fully tokenized, meaning the data is given a non-sensitive token or a unique identifier linking to the original data. Security and privacy are sacrosanct, and the data still belongs to the participant, he said. 

"We're not just building insights that will apply inside the Apple ecosystem, but they will be relevant to everybody, and that's very powerful. If you have a platform that is secure enough and private enough that people trust it, that's the platform we want to do these types of studies, and so we're motivated to do exactly that," MacRae said. 

The study will begin as a five-year endeavor but may expand beyond that time frame, and individuals living in the U.S. can enroll in the Apple Health Study through the Apple Research app in the App Store. 

THE LARGER TREND

Apple worked with Brigham and Women's Health on its Apple Heart and Movement Study along with the American Heart Association. The ongoing study explores the connection between physical activity and heart health. 

Apple's other health studies include the Apple Women's Health Study done with Harvard T.H. Chan, which examines the connection between menstrual cycles and their connection to various health conditions. 

The Apple Hearing Study with the University of Michigan School of Public Health studies sound exposure and its impact on hearing.