Google has decided to make its Baseline Study public with the Study Kit testing phase.
Latest Google news is that the company has announced that Study Kit is in the testing process before it releases. Last year in July, the search engine giant announced the idea of Baseline Study. It is a “moonshot” which involves the collection and analysis of diagnostics coming from the people in order to paint a “what it means to be healthy” picture utilizing that data. While this started as a pilot which was limited to the students of Duke University and Stanford University, with 175 participants in July 2014. However, it is reported that the company has decided to take this project further and will launch it in this year, a bigger launch it would be.
In this regard, Google news reports that it has been testing the “Study Kit”, the very first app which shall be used to collect the data. The Study Kit shall be available in the form of Android and iOS apps and also as Chrome extension. This all is available only to the limited number of participants included in the Baseline pilot and is not public yet.
One of the search engine giant’s spokesperson expressed that, “an app is one route we’re considering and some of our pilot participants are testing this early version.”
These apps included in the Study Kit were introduced in the end of March but people couldn’t understand anything about them.
Some of the people thought that Study Kit was an answer to the Research Kit by Apple, an open source project. This project lets the nonprofits in medical and other companies setup the research projects. Such as on Parkinson’s disease or asthma. In this way, the consumers will be able to upload data to the projects with the help of their Apple devices. This can be called the re-imagination of a research lab. However, the ambition for the company’s Baseline Study is at the same time, more complex and more singular sounding.
One aspect that is clear is that at such an early stage of the project, Google wishes to stay away from the idea that this project is connected to the wider business objectives and interests of the company such as mobile, advertising, search and connected home and its products, payments and what so ever the product its team could think of in the next years.
The tech giant points out in the two page description which highlights the intervention of making the project that it is “a contribution to science; it’s not intended to generate a new product at Google.” Baseline will be overseen by the independent boards that shall look after the process in which the data is used and also assure that it remains anonymous.
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