In an announcement made at the 'Spring Forward' event held in San Francisco on March 9, tech giant Apple unveiled a new open-source platform - ResearchKit - which marks the next wave of healthcare-related consumer technology that can revolutionize the medical research industry.

The ResearchKit platform has been developed by Apple in coordination with experts from 12 separate institutions, including the University of Oxford and Stanford. The platform - which will be officially be released by Apple in April - will give medical research teams the ability to create apps of their own for large-scale distribution.

The apps which medical researchers create and pin to Apple's ResearchKit platform will enable them to customize data testing exactly in the manner they require, so as to net a more adequate and appropriate amount of responses.

As such, Apple's new ResearchKit open-source platform is essentially a health-app update will unfold an opportunity for medical researchers to benefit from an ever-increasing number of iPhone users.

Researchers can tap into the growing iPhone universe, for the purpose of recruitment and enrollment of study participants, as well as for collection of data and monitoring of health outcomes that comprise the aim of research.