Apple Health Frameworks
Part 2, Episode 06, Learn more about ResearchKit
In this episode, I want to tell you how to work with ResearchKit and the huge benefits of using ResearchKit in different projects.
In ResearchKit Framework, you have different types of Tasks which you can present to the users; each task contains a set of steps, it can be either survey, consent process, or active tasks.
Since you did add an onboarding survey, you’ve already worked with ResearchKit Framework, So I want to tell you more in detail.
Let’s start with a survey. Each survey can have different steps. Here are different steps that you can have:
- Instruction
- Question
- Form
- VideoInstruction
http://researchkit.org/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOverview.html You can put these steps together and make a task as a type of survey exactly as you did for onboarding.
Next is Consent, as apple mentioned in their document: The ResearchKit framework provides visual consent templates that you can customize to explain the details of your research study and obtain a signature if needed.
The ResearchKit framework comes with some predefined sections that are commonly included in consent documents:
- Overview
- Data gathering
- Privacy
- Data use
- Time commitment
- Surveys
- Tasks
- Withdrawal
Each of these contests is a visual template, and you need to fill it with the correct information and make it ready for your user; in this project, we use only a WebViewStep with a showSignatureAfterContent feature, but you can definitely open the document from apple and dig into more details and choose the one that suits you more. https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/blob/main/docs/InformedConsent/InformedConsent-template.markdown
And last but not least Active tasks, Apple provides us predefined Active tasks under seven categories:
- motor activities
- fitness
- cognition
- speech
- hearing
- hand dexterity
- vision
https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/blob/main/docs/ActiveTasks/ActiveTasks-template.markdown If you want to do these tasks, users should actively do it; it means it uses different sensors to track what users are doing to grab the relevant information and provide it for you; which we are going to use a Range of Motion task which is part of the first category.
As apple mentioned, The ResearchKit framework does not include a data management solution, and this framework can be used with a data management solution of your choice; however, with the following episodes, I’ll tell you how to use CareKit with the ResearchKit to store your data.