The coming era of human phenotyping. Nature Biotechnology. Volume: 33, Page: 567 Year published: (2015) DOI: doi:10.1038/nbt.3266
The Apple ResearchKit is a mobile platform that taps into the iPhone’s 700 million global users to find individuals interested in participating in human research studies. The first five apps included in the kit enable users to enroll in observational studies on Parkinson’s (mPower app), cardiovascular health (MyHeart Counts), breast cancer (Share The Journey), asthma (Asthma Mobile Health) and diabetes (GlucoSuccess). The studies are being run in conjunction with 17 different partner research institutions and foundations, many of which are US-based.
It is the latest of several ambitious initiatives that seek to harness the convergence of mobile technology, wearable sensors for measuring phenotypic markers, and highly sensitive technologies for measuring genomic, epigenetic, proteomic and metabolic markers in blood, stool and tissue.
Unfortunatly the main concert of this platform is BIG DATA: “the harnessing of these technologies with computational platforms to store, share, filter and analyze the data will make it possible to collect markers of health and disease data for entire human populations, opening new possibilities for biomedical research”
In our paper of i2i era and in the introduction of Health Small Data (HSD) we envisage the Medical Device (MD) data for the benefits of the users concern by their own private health to build a preventive, non-reactive, personalize medicine. Whether personalized medicine will take advantage of Big Data is not the issue, the issue is to loose the main interest of the HSD which is the individual.
Even the above paper consider that the bias for Big Data is that this is Small Data meaning: belong to particular demographics and is self-reported and require the assurances of quality, sensitivity and accuracy for the sensors in mobile devices.
By contrast HSD do not take into consideration human phenotypic variations since data is used for individuals and benefit of the users themselves who fix the healthy conditions in a non-comparative manner.
