That's a bit of a straw man argument. I would have chosen another product to highlight Apple Pay though. It's not just the irony in following it with a diabetes app, but that Tim Cook's predecessor had a well-know quote about selling "sugared water".
Well, someday if you work really hard, you can make the leap from pundit on the Internet to making that call. In the meantime, can we make HN better and avoid making silly comments top voted? "Does anyone get the irony..."
The link has since been updated, it originally pointed to the live stream. I can see how this thread (and probably a few others) doesn't make very much sense now.
Silicon ingots run to about $70-$200/kg according to Alibaba. I think I read that Intel buys their silicon from a specialist supplier rather than grow their own ingots.
This is actually an improvement, in that before this legislation it was free to bottle your own water in BC. This price isn't nearly high enough, but it's better[] than before.
The last estimate I saw was that Nestle was going to pay about $550/yr to bottle and sell our water back to us.
Look at it another way: the incremental unit cost of flavours, colours and carbonation probably isn't much. So really, every bottled beverage is primarily driven by logistics, marketing and consumer willingness. I doubt water is any more profitable than cola.
The difference with plain water is it's pretty much a true commodity product; assuming free-market economics, if it really were feasible to lower prices it would have already happened.
Well, they also bottle municipal water and sell it straight up (dasani[1] i think?). I certainly agree that the flavored water, being still sold as "water", is a pretty fucking awful trend though.
This is probably the coolest announcement from the event, at least from the perspective of societal benefits.
Medical research faces a real challenge of selection bias. Survey respondents and study participants largely come from two groups: 1) undergrads responding to a campus flyer, and 2) local university-town residents looking to make extra money. Obviously this means respondents are geographically homogenous, and in many cases socioeconomically homogenous as well. Enabling a wider reach for researchers will not only increase sample size, but also eliminate selection bias. This is a very, very good thing.
Also, now research isn't limited to only university researchers.
I wonder if the plan is to allow participants to earn credits on apple pay.
We've had similar stuff like ResearchKit in existence for quite long. One of the most popular of such sites is patientslikeme.com .It and others did a great job around this, but usage is relatively rare.
The hard thing about such sites is:how do you incentivize people to contribute really personal information and do so on a regular basis(even if said action takes a relatively long time) ?
So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
> So i wonder what can Apple do to make this activity common, that other companies couldn't do ? How will they achieve this ?
A large marketing budget helps, e.g. see the video they launched with. Making it easy to use and frictionless would also help (no need to log into the website, no need to figure out how to sign a PDF or download a consent form or whatever the normal user flow is).
What concerns me is people gaming the apps; downloading them and filling them with fake data just to be malicious. You fix one problem and introduce another...
There's a huge opening here if pervasive sensors ever become consistent, calibrated, and easy-to-use-properly enough that they can supplement in-clinic data streams with at-home ones. This would open up the research contribution opportunity to people who cannot participate in clinical trials today due to distance from trial sites---this is something like 99% of the people who might feasibly be interesting to a clinical trial.
The big step in clinical research is the PIII trial and these are almost universally held up in enrollment. If this stuff was pervasive and trusty enough to be used in even a fraction of trial therapeutic areas it would revolutionize research and medicine in those indications.
All that to suggest the opportunity. I'm not exactly bullish on Research Kit tbh though. The "if" in my first sentence still appears to be a ways out and the kind of "throw the kitchen sink at it and average everything out in post" analytics championed by big data/machine learning of today doesn't fly well with the FDA.
I don't see the similarity with patientslikeme.com
Apple has created a UI toolkit to enable researchers to directly get data from participants via an app. All control is in the hands of the researcher creating the app.
And the app will be used for traditional research studies, the only difference is that participants enter data via their app.
You would move selection bias towards users who can afford the Apple Watch. This will not be inherently worthless data, but will be biased nonetheless.
I think having millions of participants in most cases is very worth having the bias that it will introduce. It'll be better than the middle class white kid bias that already exists in a lot of this research.
APPL said research kit will be open source, so if that is indeed true, then it will depend on those non profits if they will support android. if health kit gets ported to android.
I wonder how easy it will be to bias the samples for profit. Make some bots to submit bogus data that shows that people that consume product XYZ are healthier. Or, just make the health apps bias the data. Like say company XYZ gives kickbacks to "RecordYourActivity" app in exchange for reporting something that suggests MySnakeOil is good for you.
Of course I guess that kind of thing happens already. Just wondering will this make it worse, better or about the same.
The Apple Watch would likely be an ideal tool to improve prescription compliance in older patients. Perfect for issuing reminders about time and dosage (and for getting a confirmation that the task has been completed).
We've actually already solved this problem pre Apple Watch. It's called Blister Packs, which basically is an arrangement of the medications of when a patient is supposed to take them.
Blister packs help, but they won't buzz on your wrist at the right time to take the meds (with a text reminder indicating what all of the buzzing is about).
As the spec for Swift solidifies, we'll see open source implementations. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple ends up releasing Swift as open source eventually as well.
I agree. You would have to have Android support to have a more representative selection. Some Android phones are cheap enough they could be purchased for participants as well.
Parkinson mPower study app by Sage Bionetworks, University of Rochester, Beijing Institute of Geriatrics, and The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
It's calculated. Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source—here, the utility is in the transparency as well as apple's traditional offers of usability and reliability.
> Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source
I don't know about that. HealthKit is essentially closed and no one seems to mind, and it's all about the data ultimately anyway. Maybe it's a regulatory thing? Regardless, it's nice to see.
Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Seems to apply for almost anything. Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter and so on... It's all about putting in and getting data from a database
> Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"?
Apps, sure. Tools? Hell no. File processors, browsers, libraries.... But HealthKit adds virtually no value aside from the schema of health data. There's not much to be gained from opening it. Honestly, I'd argue the same about hacker news and reddit: it's great that reddit is open source, but it's hardly necessary for me to perform research on it because the semantics of loading/storing/existing are so well defined.
However, the bulk of modern Webkit is BSD 2.0, using LGPL libraries. Apple (and the other contributors) were under no obligation to contribute that bit.
WebKit has been open sourced 10 years ago. CUPS is even older than that. What has Apple been up to recently?
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You know, you could name projects instead of clicking the upside-down arrow. Clang comes to mind (not LLVM). Google and others contribute heavily to clang, but Apple started it. They deserve credit for that. Anything else?
Keep in mind when responding that Webkit, Clang/LLVM, and Cups are all not created by Apple, they're all preexisting projects or forks that essentially necessitated doing their work in the open.
Apple owns CUPS though, I highly suggest that you read the license terms[1] for it now:
License Exceptions
1. (a) Software that is developed by any person or entity for an Apple Operating System ("Apple OS-Developed Software"), including but not limited to Apple and third party printer drivers, filters, and backends for an Apple Operating System, that is linked to the CUPS imaging library or based on any sample filters or backends provided with CUPS shall not be considered to be a derivative work or collective work based on the CUPS program and is exempt from the mandatory source code release clauses of the GNU GPL.
AFAIK Clang (not LLVM) was entirely created by Apple and could have been proprietary
Also the x86 Darwin kernel was made open source with no benefit to Apple, and winocm managed to port it to ARM too (although it's pretty debatable if it actually provides anything useful)
> they're all preexisting projects or forks that essentially necessitated doing their work in the open.
That's true of Cups and part of WebKit (most of the actual browser engine is BSD-licensed, but there are LGPL libraries used); however, Apple was certainly under no obligation to contribute its changes to LLVM back, or to contribute clang back _at all_.
Open Source in this case might not make much of a difference. If this is written in Swift and only runs under iOS, or if it ties with a certain Apple service that requires certificates issued by Apple it won't make much of a difference if you can read the full source code, even if it's released under an MIT or similarly open license.
As long as the data this gathers can't be used (or contributed to) by a third party, it's still a 100% Apple property, regardless of code availability.
We'll see how this stuff actually works in practice pretty soon, but as this is more than just a chunk of code to run on a device, what exactly is going to be "open" here?
A formal standard that can be implemented and used by other platforms, both on the device and server side, would be great. But Apple's last promise to make something they developed "open" (iMessage as a standard) evaporated and has since been completely proprietary.
It is an open-source framework allowing medical researchers and professionals to interact directly with patients via iOS applications. Patients will be able to perform tests, fill out questionnaires, etc., and have the results sent directly to researchers.
Sure, open-source is a good thing. I strongly support OSS and as much as possible run systems at work using FreeBSD, Linux, etc.
I've worked in medical practice (and research) for a long time. Considering the vital importance of transactional transparency in carrying out the mission of these fields, as useful as open source is generally, I think the impact in medicine is even greater.
But open source is only part of it, open platform is at least as important. I guess I'm not a very trusting soul. Frankly, I don't believe Apple is going to do anything primarily for our good. Rather to my senses the announcement has the flavor of an attempt to gain a toehold or increase market share in the big money research domain.
If Apple (or other player) truly wants to generously donate to the public cause, that's wonderful. Then why not support efforts to develop open source, cross-platform apps, assuring all medical research can benefit? Not directed only or in particular at Apple, it's an issue I've raised whenever I have the chance: open source/platform agnostic development can save money and produce more reliable and secure systems.
As someone about to start a medical residency in the Bay Area who is interested in developing projects to work on a research platform like this, could the HN braintrust recommend a resource for learning the basics of whatever developer tools or frameworks that would be required to work with ResearchKit?
Research works best when the subjects of long term studies can see and react to the data they are generating in real time. Anti-blind trials are the future. /s
It appears to mostly be an iOS UI toolkit of sorts for easing the creation of individual apps to collect research data. The hard work must still be done by each individual research project.
I think the benefit is that the iPhone has sensors that can collect lots of data. For example, the Perkinson's(?) app makes you tap on two targets quickly and say "aaaaa" for long and analyzes the ups and downs in vocal cords using the mic.
Patients can't track all this by themselves. Plus, it will automatically send it to researchers. Much easier than making someone enter information on surveymonkey or polldaddy.
There's certainly going to be a selection bias, as others have said. I think the most exciting opportunity though is for very fine grained and longitudinal studies.
I'm not sure. There were several medical crowd sourcing sites, with patients like me quite successful, but only small incremental advances. Not sure if it's because real research needs more than patient symptoms - it also needs objective stuff like blood tests.
Beyond being more efficient, they need to have a shift in thinking as to what constitutes a quality SW development process. Example: as of right now, they still think that a waterfall process is the only process that is "correct".
That was before VirnetX sued them for $708 million for patent violations, reduced to $368.2 by the judge. To avoid having to license the patents in question, Apple re-architected FaceTime so it's no longer peer-to-peer and instead routes everything through central servers.
