What is ResearchKit?

At its core, ResearchKit orchestrates the administering of tasks and recording of the results from each step of the task. ResearchKit's tasks are segregated into modules: surveys, informed consent, and active tasks. Surveys are questionnaires that prompt the participant to answer to a set of questions for the purpose of recording information that can be used for statistical analysis. Surveys support a variety of question types and answer formats. The informed consent module provides the basic mechanism that is necessary to conduct informed consent visually. Active tasks provide the framework that is necessary to allow applications to develop tasks for the participant. On its announcement, ResearchKit was shipped with a number of predefined tasks, as follows:

1. Fitness check: The participant is asked to walk for a specified duration while recording data from various sensors. If the heart-rate data is available at the conclusion of the task, the user is asked to sit down for a duration and the data recording continues.
2. Short Walk: The participant is asked to walk a short distance while data from the accelerometer and pedometer data is being recorded.
3. Audio recording: The participant is asked to record the sound that they make.
4. Finger tapping: The participant is asked to tap two targets on the screen as touch activity and accelerometer data is being recorded.
5. Spatial-span memory: The participant is asked to participate in a game-like task that tests their ability to repeat a pattern of increasing length.

Subsequent chapters will go to greater depths on how to use the predefined activities provided by ResearchKit and construct new active tasks.

Privacy

In a clinical research application, nothing is more important than the privacy of the user's personal information. Whether this information resides in a device or during transmittal to a data-collection server, personal health information must be safeguarded at each step. Information in the device must be protected irrespective of whether the application operating in the foreground, background, or not executing at all. If the information is transmitted to a data-collection server, it must be safeguarded during transmission. Safeguarding data in transit includes protecting the data during transmission as well as ensuring that the data is going to the correct destination.

Safeguarding of personal health information is the responsibility of the application. ResearchKit provides little capability in this regard other than to ensure classes that may contain user information compile with the NSSecureCoding protocol. The following security and privacy-related issues must be considered by the application developer:

• The Data Protection service is the default level of protection for data files stored in the device by the iOS application.
• The Data Protection level for directories that may contain the uploaded data in the background.
• The protection of files containing the data that may be uploaded. The data to be uploaded will need additional levels of protection than those offered by the Data Protection service.
• The authentication of the endpoint where data will be uploaded.