This week, Open mHealth announced the launch of ResearchStack, “the first Android framework for building and designing apps for clinical studies.” Over the past five months, principal investigator Deborah Estrin worked with collaborators at Open mHealth, Cornell Tech, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and touchlab to provide developers and researchers with the ability to adapt existing clinical study iOS apps to the Android platform – making them accessible to Android’s 1.4 billion users worldwide.
Estrin, who is Open mHealth’s co-founder and advisory board chair, discussed the potential of ResearchStack and the importance of bringing the small data analysis capabilities present in Apple’s ResearchKit to Android:
“‘ResearchKit unleashed the power of using mobile devices for clinical research,’ said Deborah Estrin, PI for the Research Stack project as well as Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, ‘Precluding participation by Android users in the longer term would have led to unrepresentative samples of the population. Research Stack greatly expands the number and diversity of potential participants.’”
