What you need to know

• Apple has released an update for its Research app.
• The update allows users to transfer their study progress to a new device over iCloud backup.
• The app is currently running three different research studies.

Today, Apple has released a notable update to the Apple Research app that ensures you don't lose the progress of your participation in a study when you switch devices.

Version 2.3 of the Apple Research app adds the ability to transfer the progress of a study you are currently participating in to another device using iCloud backup:

This update includes bug fixes and improvements including:

• Support for transferring study progress to a new device using iCloud backup.

The app is currently running three different studies: the Apple Women's Health Study, the Apple Heart and Movement Study, and the Apple Hearing Study.

1. Join the Apple Women's Health Study, conducted in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and National Institue of Health Sciences to help advance the understanding of menstrual cycles and health conditions such as infertility, osteoporosis, and menopause.
2. Join the Apple Heart and Movement Study, conducted in partnership with the American Heart Association and Bringham and Women's Hospital to help advance discovery in heart science and to help us learn how activity and your habits can contribute to a healthier heart.
3. Join the Apple Hearing Study, conducted in partnership with the University of Michigan to help advance the understanding of how sound exposure levels over time can impact your hearing, stress levels, and cardiac health.

You can head over and download the Apple Research app from the App Store for free now.

What you need to know

• The Apple Hearing Study accidentally collected historical data from its participants.
• The data has been deleted and a bug fix released.

In an email sent out to participants of the Apple Hearing Study, it appears that a bug has caused the study to unintentionally collect thirty days of historical data. The data collected were those already consented to by users, but the consent form that users agree to did not state that historical data would be collected.

The letter did confirm that at no time did Apple have access to any of the historical data and that it has already been deleted. In order to fix the bug, users need to update to the latest version of the Apple Research app. Until they do, historical data will continue to be looked for and deleted.

Below is a full readout of the email sent to participants:

You can download the latest version of the Apple Research App on the App Store now.

What you need to know

• Apple has released an update to the Apple Research app.
• The update includes a new hearing test for the Apple Hearing Study.
• It also adds a new survey for the Apple Heart and Movement Study.

Apple has released an update to the Apple Research app today that brings two new additions to the user experience: a new test and a new survey.

Version 1.3 of the app brings a new test to the Apple Hearing Study called the "Speech in Noise" test. The test is designed to help researchers understand your ability to hear in various conditions.

The update also brings a new survey to the app. The survey, which is located under the Apple Heart & Movement Study, was built to help researchers understand the impact of COVID-19 on daily life.

The update also brings some bug fixes and performance improvements, but Apple did not provide any detail for those updates.

The Apple Research app currently has three different studies you can participate in: the Apple Women's Health Study, the Apple Heart and Movement Study, and the Apple Hearing Study.

The future of health research is you! Now you can contribute to groundbreaking health research in women's health, hearing health or heart health simply by using your Apple Watch and iPhone, and the Research app. Your data and participation will help advance researchers' understanding of these areas in health that have not been well understood until now and could lead to the development of new products that will help millions lead longer and healthier lives.

1. Join the Apple Women's Health Study, conducted in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and National Institue of Health Sciences to help advance the understanding of menstrual cycles and health conditions such as infertility, osteoporosis, and menopause.
2. Join the Apple Heart and Movement Study, conducted in partnership with the American Heart Association and Bringham and Women's Hospital to help advance discovery in heart science and to help us learn how activity and your habits can contribute to a healthier heart.
3. Join the Apple Hearing Study, conducted in partnership with the University of Michigan to help advance the understanding of how sound exposure levels over time can impact your hearing, stress levels, and cardiac health.

You can download the Apple Research app for free on the App Store.

During its Spring 2016 event, Apple took some time to provide an update on how its Health data is affecting the lives of many. Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Williams, stated that the Parkinson's study became the largest in history in less than 24 hours. The Parkinson's app could help track per-patient data Mount Sinai asthma app got participants from all 50 states, allowing them to collect data from around the country. Massachusetts General Hospital got enough data that they were able to determine that sub-types of Type 2 Diabetes existed.

ResearchKit is also powering the team at Duke while creating an at-home tool to help in diagnosing autism by using the front-facing camera and algorithms to analyze emotional responses of children. The Epi Watch app uses the Apple Watch to gather data during seizures, which then used data to develop a seizure detector alert app.

Now, Apple has announced CareKit, a new way to empower people with data about their health. Some of the initial launch partners include Rochester General Hospital, UCSF, The Johns Hopkins Hospital, PDCNY. Standford Medicine, Emory Healthcare. An example of a Care Kit app from Texas Medical Center is an app that allows patients to record recovery data and the plan can easily be updated by a physician remotely. Apple notes that "nothing is more sensitive than your health data," and will ensure that all the data is kept safe. CareKit will be open source just like ResearchKit when it is made available in April.

Press releases

Apple Announces Advancements to ResearchKit

Studies Incorporate Genetic Data for Postpartum Depression, Asthma & Cardiovascular Disease

CUPERTINO, California — March 21, 2016 — Apple® today announced advancements to the open source ResearchKit™ framework that bring genetic data and a series of medical tests typically conducted in an exam room to iPhone® apps. Medical researchers are adopting these new features to design targeted studies for diseases and conditions that affect billions of people around the world and to gather more specific types of data from participants.

"The response to ResearchKit has been fantastic. Virtually overnight, many ResearchKit studies became the largest in history and researchers are gaining insights and making discoveries that weren't possible before," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. "Medical researchers around the world continue to use iPhone to transform what we know about complex diseases, and with continued support from the open source community, the opportunities for iPhone in medical research are endless."

ResearchKit turns iPhone into a powerful tool for medical research by helping doctors, scientists and other researchers gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants anywhere in the world using iPhone apps. Participants enrolled in these app-based studies can review an interactive informed consent process, easily complete active tasks or submit survey responses, and choose how their health data is shared with researchers, making contributions to medical research easier than ever.

By delivering ResearchKit as open source, any developer can quickly design a research study for iPhone. They can also build on the available software code and contribute their tasks back to the community to help other researchers do more with the framework. Using a new module just released to the open source community, researchers are now able to incorporate genetic data into their studies in a seamless, simple and low cost way. Designed by 23andMe, the module allows study participants to easily contribute their genetic data to medical research. Researchers are also working with the National Institute of Mental Health to deliver "spit kits" to study participants based on a series of survey results.

"There's so much we still need to learn about postpartum depression and it may be DNA that provides the key to better understanding why some women experience symptoms and others do not," said Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH, director of the Perinatal Psychiatry Program at the UNC Center for Women's Mood Disorders. "With ResearchKit, and now the ability to incorporate genetic data, we're able to engage women with postpartum depression from a wide geographic and demographic range and can analyze the genomic signature of postpartum depression to help us find more effective treatments."

"Collecting this type of information will help researchers determine genomic indicators for specific diseases and conditions," said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. "Take asthma, for example. ResearchKit is allowing us to study this population more broadly than ever before and through the large amounts of data we're able to gather from iPhone, we're understanding how factors like environment, geography and genes influence one's disease and response to treatment."

ResearchKit studies incorporating genetic data: Postpartum Depression: PPD Act is a new app-based study that will use genetic testing to better understand why some women are impacted by postpartum depression by examining the genetic makeup of those with the condition. Led by the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the international Postpartum Depression: Action Towards Causes and Treatment Consortium, PPD Act will offer study participants access to a "spit kit" from the National Institute of Mental Health. Cardiovascular Disease: Developed by Stanford Medicine, the MyHeart Counts app will use genetic data from existing 23andMe customers to help determine predisposition to heart conditions and measure how a participant's activity and lifestyle relate to cardiovascular health. By studying these relationships on a broad scale, researchers hope to be able to better understand how to keep hearts healthy. Asthma: The Asthma Health app, designed to track symptom patterns in an individual and identify potential triggers for these symptoms, will use genetic data from 23andMe customers to help researchers better understand ways to personalize asthma treatment. Asthma Health is designed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions.

Researchers continue to adapt ResearchKit and build on the framework by contributing new modules that bring exam room medical tests to iPhone apps. Key contributions include the ability to study tone audiometry; measure reaction time through delivery of a known stimulus to a known response; assess the speed of information processing and working memory; use the mathematical puzzle Tower of Hanoi for cognition studies; and conduct a timed walk test.

ResearchKit studies continue to expand internationally and are available in Australia, Austria, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US. ResearchKit apps are available on the App Store® for iPhone 5 and later, and the latest generation of iPod touch®.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple's four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple's 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

Apple Advances Health Apps with CareKit

New Software Framework Helps Developers Empower People to Take a More Active Role in their Health

CUPERTINO, California — March 21, 2016 — Apple® today announced CareKit™, a new software framework designed to help developers enable people to actively manage their own medical conditions. iPhone® apps using CareKit make it easier for individuals to keep track of care plans and monitor symptoms and medication; providing insights that help people better understand their own health. With the ability to share information with doctors, nurses or family members, CareKit apps help people take a more active role in their health.

"We're thrilled with the profound impact ResearchKit has already had on the pace and scale of conducting medical research, and have realized that many of the same principles could help with individual care," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. "We believe that giving individuals the tools to understand what is happening with their health is incredibly powerful, and apps designed using CareKit make this a reality by empowering people to take a more active role in their care."

CareKit will be released as an open source framework next month allowing the developer community to continue building on the first four modules designed by Apple, that include: * Care Card helps people track their individual care plans and action items, such as taking medication or completing physical therapy exercises. Activities can automatically be tracked and entered using sensors in Apple Watch® or iPhone; * Symptom and Measurement Tracker lets users easily record their symptoms and how they're feeling, like monitoring temperature for possible infections or measuring pain or fatigue. Progress updates could include simple surveys, photos that capture the progression of a wound or activities calculated by using the iPhone's accelerometer and gyroscope, like quantifying range of motion; * Insight Dashboard maps symptoms against the action items in the Care Card to easily show how treatments are working; and * Connect makes it easy for people to share information and communicate with doctors, care teams or family members about their health and any change in condition.

"With ResearchKit, we quickly realized the power of mobile apps for running inexpensive, high-quality clinical studies with unprecedented reach," said Ray Dorsey, MD, David M. Levy Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. "We hope that CareKit will help us close the gap between our research findings and how we care for our Parkinson's patients day-to-day. It's opening up a whole new opportunity for the democratization of research and medicine."

Developers of health and wellness apps are excited to build these CareKit modules into apps for Parkinson's patients, post-surgery progress, home health monitoring, diabetes management, mental health and maternal health. * Sage Bionetworks and the University of Rochester are using CareKit to turn the mPower ResearchKit™ study into a valuable tool to help better inform patients about their condition and care providers about treatment. * The Texas Medical Center is designing apps to guide and support care pathways for its 8 million patients to improve their health through enhanced connectivity with their care teams. * Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will provide patients with more insight into their own chronic care management through home health monitoring devices that securely store data in HealthKit™. * One Drop is empowering people with a better approach to managing their diabetes. * Start, by Iodine, helps people on antidepressants understand if their medication is working for them or not, and helps their doctors deliver more informed care. * Glow, Inc. will incorporate CareKit modules into its pregnancy app, Glow Nurture, to guide women through a healthier pregnancy.

For more information, visit www.apple.com/carekit.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple's four software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud. Apple's 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it.

IBM has announced a partnership with the American Sleep Apnea Association to launch a new sleep study app, SleepHealth. Developed using Apple's ResearchKit framework, SleepHealth can measure your daily activity and track your sleep patterns, helping you better understand how you sleep. It also comes with an Apple Watch app for more accurate tracking.

Here are the major features of SleepHealth:

Record and track your:

• Physical activity through your iPhone or a HealthKit-linked device
• Alertness level each day, testing your reaction time to a stimulus
• Morning and evening checks to understand how your actions actions throughout the day affect your sleep, and how the quality and quantity of your sleep affect your daily actions

Receive reminders and notifications about:

• Your activity and sleep
• Activities and surveys to complete

Get educated:

• Learn about your activity level
• Learn about sleep disorders and their effects
• Receive frequent updates on sleep research and news through the newsfeed

SleepHealth is the first ReasearchKit app to utilized IBM's Watson Health Cloud, which allows researchers to aggregate data from the study, analysing it to find patterns and connections using machine learning.

You can grab SleepHealth from the App Store now.

• Free - Download Now

Asthma Health, the ResearchKit-powered asthma study from Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine, is now available for download and use in both the UK and Ireland. One of the initial crop of ResearchKit apps launched in March 2015, Asthma Health tracks symptom patterns and potential triggers, which allows researchers to develop new, more personalized treatments for asthma.

In its latest release, Asthma Health added the following capabilities:

• Visualize nearby air quality and local pollutants with BreezoMeter
• Now you can schedule additional medication reminders and personalize each of them, too
• Survey improvements allow you to enter more personalized responses
• Heart rate tracking can now be included, in the dashboard

You can grab Asthma Health and begin participating in the study right now.

• Free - Download Now

Apple CEO Tim Cook surprised Mad Money anchor Jim Cramer on the air Thursday with a sweet tenth anniversary wish for the show, which turned into a lively seven-minute conversation about ResearchKit, Apple Pay, and the Apple Watch. Below is a transcript of their conversation.

Cramer: Let's take a call: go to Tim in California. Tim.

Cook: Hey Jim, I'm calling from Cupertino, California, to be exact. This is Tim Cook at Apple, and I want to congratulate you on ten great years of Mad Money.

Cramer: Wha — wow! That's even cooler. I want to congratulate you for running the greatest company on Earth and for creating such amazing wealth and the best products on Earth — for everybody! You have done a remarkable job, Tim, I am honored that you're calling in.

Cook: It's the great team here that does it. Jim, you've been a champion for American innovation, and of course Apple feels the same way, and we love the fact that you highlight innovation as the centerpiece of your show.

Cramer: Well, you know what, you make us proud and you do such incredible, incredible innovation yourself, every time. You know I am totally involved with what you're doing for the phone, but of course for the watch, and for the ResearchKit! I basically am looking at your company as being the health company of the future. I'm looking at you as being the credit card company of the future. They really are the great growth areas that you're in charge of, Tim.

Cook: You know, it's really incredible. Since, uh, in the first 24 hours of ResearchKit, we've had 11,000 people sign up for a study in cardiovascular disease through Stanford University's app. And, to put that in perspective, Stanford has told us that it would have taken normally 50 medical centers an entire year to sign up that many participants.

So ResearchKit is an absolute gamechanger.

Cramer: I think that this is the most — but people don't understand why you absolutely have to have this device [the Watch], which is why I can't — I can't wait until it comes out.

I also am focused on the fact, Tim, that your product for retail, uh, with Apple Pay, is by far the best. I have to believe that given the banks, given Visa, given MasterCard, it's perfectly realistic to believe that the customers will demand it from every major retailer in the world. Do you think I'm right?

Cook: I totally think you're right. You said last year, I think, when it first came out, that it would take the country by storm, and it's doing it. We've already got 700,000 locations accepting Apple Pay, and by the way, we really want to add your Bar San Miguel to the list.

Cramer: Tim! [laughing] Tim! You're too much!

Cook: And if you do that, I am joining you there for dinner.

Cramer: You are too much! [laughing] Tim! I've gotta ask you, Tim. We always hear that the company, it's so big, whatever. I mean, I think that you're — I look at your company, and I think it's not that expensive, you've got the best balance sheet in the world — country, company, doesn't matter.

You know my mantra: People should own Apple, not trade it. D'you think that, eventually, people will understand what I'm talking about?

Cook: I think eventually they will, yes. I mean, y'know, for people that have owned the stock for ten years or so, our stock price ten years ago when you started Mad Money was less than six dollars on a split adjusted basis. And so you can bet that those people are extremely happy right now.

Cramer: Well, everyone's thrilled with what you've done. When you come to work every day, I know you come in hungry — the competition, are you feeling like that you've kind of left it behind, or are you just every day, do you come in and say, "Someone might have a better mousetrap"?

Cook: We're always paranoid. We live paranoid, and we always want the very best products, and if we're not beating someone else, we're trying to beat the thing that we have currently shipping. Everybody here lives on the edge.

Cramer: Do you think — well, do you think that... y'know, people are worried about the world, people worry about Europe, people worry about currency. Are we being, are those just the kinds of things that Wall Street worries about, and if you're at home, or you're watching, you own a hundred shares of Apple, you should just be thinking that Tim Cook and the team are ready for pretty much anything the world might throw at us?

Cook: Currency's clearly a problem, but frankly the best companies will figure out a way to manage it.

Cramer: And I regard your company with the highest ideals and the greatest manufacturing. I know every day when you come to work I feel you must think that you have a stewardship you've got to fulfill because of Steve Jobs. I want you to know that we — that you have far exceeded what ever — anyone, I think, could have done, but you still walk in his footsteps. How do you feel about the legacy?

Cook: You know, there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about Steve, and he is still the core part of Apple, his DNA is deep in the company. His office is still next to mine with his name on the door.

And the values that he placed in here, and sort of the spirit — that we are here to make the very best products in the world that enrich people's lives — that is still the centerpiece of this company.

Cramer: And do you think that there are — I know that from Walter Isaacson's book, that there really, that the pipeline that you're using really, is, while it definitely had good things from Steve, a lot of these devices are yours and your team's, aren't they?

Cook: Oh, absolutely, yes. We're now, y'know, quite a ways away from, unfortunately, his passing, and so there's uh, there's been a lot of things that have started in creation after his passing.

Cramer: Let me ask you about where you think things are going — I know that the car, the home — do you think of them as connectivity/social mobile cloud connectivity? Do you feel as though these are the next frontiers, or is there a frontier that I'm missing, I'm not thinking big enough?

Cook: Well, I think that those are two big ones that you've talked about. I think that Health may be the biggest one of all, because for years, people have depended on strictly someone else to determine their health. And now these devices — in essence — empower people to manage and track their own health and fitness. And so I think that market is probably significantly underestimated.

Cramer: Well, let's go there, because I know my cardiologist, well, he's working on the Stanford project, knows about it, and told me that it's within our lifetime that we will have your watch, and your watch will show whether my blood pressure spiked — which it did, by the way, when you called, because I had no idea you were calling.

But we will have, from your watch, diabetes, maybe blood pressure, maybe even cancer detection because of the great access through you have, and because of the HealthKit — do you think this is within the realm of our lifetime?

Cook: Oh, I absolutely do. I absolutely do. And, y'know, discovering and curing some of these diseases will push our life expectancy much longer than it currently is, and we'll be able to enjoy Mad Money fifty years from now.

Cramer: [gasps] Aw, Tim. Well, Tim, I gotta tell ya, I am deeply honored that you called in, I think that you're the best we have, maybe the best that's ever been. Thanks so much, Tim Cook.

Cook: I really appreciate that, yeah, Jim. You say that "Some people want to make friends, I just want to make money," but let me tell you, you've made at least one friend in me, and I wish you all the best. So happy anniversary.

Apple has announced a new software framework specifically for medical research called ResearchKit. It will allow developers working with HealthKit to turn their apps into powerful diagnostic tools.

Highlighting the difficulties associated with medical research, such as small sample sizes, Apple created ResearchKit with a number of partners, including Oxford, Stanford Medicine, and University of Rochester. Users will be able to see correlations and trends right on their phone. You can determine what trials they are participating in, and what data you share.

Apple built a number of apps with their first ResearchKit partners. These include a Parkinson's research app, a tap test to measure tremors, and a walking test to measure your gait. They have also built apps for diabetes and cardiovascular research.

ResearchKit will be open source when it arrives in April. The first apps built with the framework will be available starting today.

For more on ResearchKit and Apple's other announcements today, be sure to follow along with our live blog of the event. You can get ahold of the first ResearchKit apps at the links below:

• MyHeart Counts - Download Now
• Parkinson mPower - Download Now
• GlucoSuccess - Download Now
• Share the Journey - Download Now
• Asthma Health by Mount Sinai - Download Now

Press release:

Apple Introduces ResearchKit, Giving Medical Researchers the Tools to Revolutionize Medical Studies

New Apps to Aid Research on Asthma, Breast Cancer, Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes & Parkinson's Disease

SAN FRANCISCO—March 9, 2015—Apple® today announced ResearchKit™, an open source software framework designed for medical and health research, helping doctors and scientists gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using iPhone® apps. World-class research institutions have already developed apps with ResearchKit for studies on asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson's disease.* Users decide if they want to participate in a study and how their data is shared.

"iOS apps already help millions of customers track and improve their health. With hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world, we saw an opportunity for Apple to have an even greater impact by empowering people to participate in and contribute to medical research," said Jeff Williams, Apple's senior vice president of Operations. "ResearchKit gives the scientific community access to a diverse, global population and more ways to collect data than ever before."

ResearchKit turns iPhone into a powerful tool for medical research. When granted permission by the user, apps can access data from the Health app such as weight, blood pressure, glucose levels and asthma inhaler use, which are measured by third-party devices and apps. HealthKit™ is a software framework Apple introduced with iOS 8 to provide developers the ability for health and fitness apps to communicate with each other. ResearchKit can also request from a user, access to the accelerometer, microphone, gyroscope and GPS sensors in iPhone to gain insight into a patient's gait, motor impairment, fitness, speech and memory.

ResearchKit also makes it easier to recruit participants for large-scale studies, accessing a broad cross-section of the population—not just those within driving distance of an institution. Study participants can complete tasks or submit surveys right from the app, so researchers spend less time on paperwork and more time analyzing data. ResearchKit also enables researchers to present an interactive informed consent process. Users choose which studies to participate in and the data they want to provide in each study.

"We're excited to use these new ResearchKit tools from Apple to expand participant recruitment and quickly gather even more data through the simple use of an iPhone app. The data it will provide takes us one step closer to developing more personalized care," said Patricia Ganz, MD, professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Director of Cancer Prevention & Control Research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Access to more diverse patient-reported health data will help us learn more about long-term aftereffects of cancer treatments and provide us with a better understanding of the breast cancer patient experience."

"When it comes to researching how we can better diagnose and prevent disease, numbers are everything. By using Apple's new ResearchKit framework, we're able to extend participation beyond our local community and capture significantly more data to help us understand how asthma works," said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. "Using iPhone's advanced sensors, we're able to better model an asthma patient's condition to enable us to deliver a more personalized, more precise treatment."

Developed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, the Asthma Health app is designed to facilitate asthma patient education and self-monitoring, promote positive behavioral changes and reinforce adherence to treatment plans according to current asthma guidelines. The study tracks symptom patterns in an individual and potential triggers for these exacerbations so that researchers can learn new ways to personalize asthma treatment.

The Share the Journey app, developed by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Penn Medicine, Sage Bionetworks and UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, is a research study that aims to understand why some breast cancer survivors recover faster than others, why their symptoms vary over time and what can be done to improve symptoms. Share the Journey will use surveys and sensor data on iPhone to collect and track fatigue, mood and cognitive changes, sleep disturbances and reduction in exercise.

Developed by Stanford Medicine, the MyHeart Counts app measures activity and uses risk factor and survey information to help researchers more accurately evaluate how a participant's activity and lifestyle relate to cardiovascular health. By studying these relationships on a broad scale, researchers will be able to understand better how to keep hearts healthier.

Massachusetts General Hospital developed the GlucoSuccess app to understand how various aspects of a person's life—diet, physical activity and medications—affect blood glucose levels. The app can also help participants identify how their food choices and activity relate to their best glucose levels, enabling them to clearly see correlations and take more active roles in their own well-being.

Developed by Sage Bionetworks and the University of Rochester, the Parkinson mPower app helps people living with Parkinson's disease track their symptoms by recording activities using sensors in iPhone. These activities include a memory game, finger tapping, speaking and walking. Activity and survey data from your phone are combined with data from many other participants to fuel Parkinson's research at a scale never before possible, making this the world's largest and most comprehensive study of this disease.

ResearchKit will be released as an open source framework next month, providing researchers with the ability to contribute to specific activity modules in the framework, like memory or gait testing, and share them with the global research community to further advance what we know about disease. For more information, visit www.apple.com/researchkit.

*ResearchKit apps are available on the App Store™ in the US at appstore.com/researchkit and will be rolling out to more countries in the future. iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and the latest generation of iPod touch support ResearchKit apps.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.