This week, Apple turned the iPhone into a medical research tool with the launch of ResearchKit. This open-source framework, described in the video above, lets a medical researcher set up a project to gather anonymous patient data on diseases like asthma, breast cancer and diabetes. Using their own smartphones, patients who join a project can monitor their symptoms on a regular basis — while contributing their data to researchers working to cure their condition. ResearchKit makes it possible to generate large, wide-ranging datasets about the day-to-day of disease.

ResearchKit launched with a set of five apps, including the Parkinson’s mPower app, developed by Sage Bionetworks. This app builds on the work of applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little. At TEDGlobal 2012, Little (watch his talk: A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call) made headline news when he launched the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, a data-gathering project that aimed to develop a quick and non-invasive way to detect the disease with a phone call. Since then, Little, along with collaborators in the US, has been creating Android-based apps for monitoring Parkinson’s symptoms and gathering data for research. These apps have been used to record symptoms from thousands of participants in studies in the UK and US, leading to hundreds of gigabytes of data about Parkinson’s — which may open up entirely new scientific understanding about the disease.

We asked Little to tell us how his technologies got ported to ResearchKit, and how this could take his work to the next level.

How did you get involved with developing a Parkinson’s app for ResearchKit?

Apple was really impressed with the research work I’ve been doing over the last three years on apps for monitoring symptoms of Parkinson’s. We’d been using voice recording over mobile phones since 2012, of course. We’d also developed touch-screen tapping tests and walking and balance tests using the accelerometer in the smartphones. We’d been able to show in small pilot studies that we can predict symptom severity and very accurately detect who has Parkinson’s using these apps.

We were looking to run studies on larger populations to see if it would work on a larger scale — essentially what we were doing with the PVI project, but using smartphones. My collaborators and I developed apps on Android, but Sage Bionetworks wanted to replicate it on iPhone. So Sage built the mPower app on top of Apple’s ResearchKit API, embodying many of the tests that we’ve been developing over the years.

Apple’s ResearchKit turns the health data collection capabilities of the iPhone into a medical research tool. One of the first apps on the platform takes TED Fellow Max Little’s work to the next level.

What exactly does mPower do?

mPower is an entirely remote recruitment and objective sensor data collection app, tailored specifically for Parkinson’s research. It’s designed to capture objective data about the disease using daily tests such as voice, walking, balance and manual dexterity, all using the basic functionality of the iPhone.

What difference do you think it will make to your research to have these tests running on iPhones? And what does this mean for the future of medical research in general?

Since the launch of mPower earlier this week, they’ve been able to recruit nearly 8,000 participants — so it looks like the data collection is going fantastically well!

mPower has tremendous potential for speeding up discovery of medical and biological knowledge about Parkinson’s. Having symptom tests like this on iPhone opens up the whole, non-Android half of the world’s smartphone users. Apple’s enormous reach — around 700 million users — poses an extraordinary opportunity for researchers to gather objective symptom progression data from a sizable fraction of all Parkinson’s patients all over the world. It’s not often that researchers can set up studies that have essentially zero cost, yet are able to recruit subjects in the thousands in a matter of hours.

For example, we don’t yet know what causes Parkinson’s, but we do know it can’t be entirely genetic, behavioral or environmental. So it’s not enough to study the biological/genetic side alone. We really have to gather detailed knowledge about behaviour and the environment of each patient. With objective testing using smartphones, we can more fully complete the scientific picture.

Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh 128k at an Apple shareholders’ meeting. Excitement was high after the airing of the now-classic commercial “1984” during the Super Bowl two days before, and the demo — complete with the “Chariots of Fire” theme song — lived up to the hype.

The unveiling was the backdrop for another thing that started in 1984: TED. At that first conference, Nicholas Negroponte made at jab at the Macintosh mouse in his talk, “5 predictions.” And at the next TED, held in 1990, John Sculley shared his vision for what he calls the “knowledge navigator,” a device eerily iPad-esque.

As we wish Macintosh a happy birthday, we can’t help but think of some of our intertwined moments. Here, a look.

• One of our most-viewed talks ever is Steve Jobs’ Stanford University commencement speech, “How to live before you die.” The talk is even more poignant now, two years after his death. In it, Jobs remembers taking a calligraphy class in college. “I found it fascinating. But none of it had any hope of any practical application in my life,” he said. “But 10 years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.”

Roger Ebert speaks through his Mac at TED2011. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

• Roger Ebert lost the ability to talk, and eat, after his battle with cancer. But on the TED2011 stage, he was able to speak again — with the help of a MacBook. He begins this moving talk, “These are my words, but this is not my voice. This is Alex, the best computer voice I’ve been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh.”

• At TED2006, Jeff Han gave a talk called “The radical promise of the multi-touch interface,” blowing the audience away with his pressure-sensitive computer screen interface. So a year later, when the iPhone was launched with a similar feel, many tried to connect the dots between the two. David Pogue asked Steve Jobs about Han’s technology on the day of the release — but Han told the TED Blog there wasn’t a connection, or any bitterness, to be found. “The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it’s Apple,” he says. “I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands.”

Chris Anderson holds his Macbook as he interviews Bill Gates. Photo: Joshua Wanyama

• At TED2009, curator Chris Anderson interviewed Bill Gates and — as many pointed out — read his questions off a Macbook perched on his lap, Apple logo glowing. A year later, Anderson and Gates met on the TED stage once again — and this time Anderson kindly covered the Apple logo on his laptop with a sticker of speaker John Hodgman (who played the PC in those “I’m a Mac; and I’m a PC” commercials). When Gates noticed, he joked, “I have your face on my PC.”

The next year, the two joked about the incident. Photo: Red Maxwell

• At TED2010, John Underkoffler — perhaps best known as the person who designed the interface for Minority Report — gave a talk called “Pointing to the future of UI.” In it, he reflected on the advent of Macintosh, saying, “It was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general. It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation, thought about computers, how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them.”

A look at TED’s Media Cave setup. Photos: James Duncan Davidson

• To complement the Mac’s many appearances onstage, our backstage production environment — where we capture and edit TED Talks as they happen — is Mac-centric too. A typical setup is described in this technical breakdown of the 2012 Media Cave by photographer James Duncan Davidson. But perhaps the biggest Mac enthusiast on our staff is Tom Rielly, who founded Yale’s Macintosh User Group in 1984. He wrote the piece “How Steve Jobs and the Invention of the Mac Saved My Life” for Out Magazine.

• And today, Apple released this celebration of their 30th anniversary. The first person in the video: John Maeda, who has given three gripping TED Talks. Also making appearance: Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalf (who funded their startup magazine Wired at a TED), David Carson (watch his talk from TED2003) and John Knoll (who spoke at TED2008).

To many more birthdays, Mac.

Today, Apple thrilled the tech world by revealing its two new iPhones, one a candy-colored, lower-priced model. And we were very excited to see our new TED iOS7 app featured in the presentation, toward the middle of the grid above. More on that soon.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Pico Iyer (watch his TED Talk) searches for the value of suffering in a quietly shattering essay that ties together the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and our reaction to seeing the desperate suffering in Syria now.

Time magazine’s list of the hottest university classes, as expected, contains a few TED stars — Nina Jablonski, Laurie Santos, Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, Dan Ariely. It’s also an insanely fun read, full of quirky profs and niche topics you suddenly need to know everything about. Anyone else feel like going back to school?

The Stir takes a look at what Brene Brown’s “Listening to Shame” means for moms.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, artist JR (read about his TED Prize wish) headed to the Atlanta neighborhood where King grew up and pasted enormous images from the march on local buildings. Photo, above.

Sylvia Earle (watch her talk) has written the intro for a buzzed-about new book on the rise of jellyfish in our degraded oceans. As Jeremy Jackson said in his TED Talk: As we crash fishery after fishery, our ocean will come to be dominated by bacteria and jellyfish.

The Lasker Awards (which MetaFilter calls “America’s Nobels”) were announced this week, and Bill Gates (check out his talks) and Melinda Gates (watch her talk) share the Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award. (Another award went to three inventors of the cochlear implant.)

We love celebrities, Robert Sapolsky admits in the new Nautilus. Why? “Because we’re primates with vested interests in tracking social hierarchies and patterns of social affiliation. And celebrities provide our primate minds with stimulating gyrations of hierarchy.”

This week, the comic “Betty” (above) references Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk “Your body languages shapes who you are” and her praise of power posing. While Cuddy does not recommend power posing as a way to get the upper hand in a relationship, she does say it’s a great way to boost confidence before a job interview.

Cass Sunstein (an economist and coincidentally the husband of TED speaker Samantha Power) reviews TED speaker Sendhil Mullainathan’s new book, Scarcity, cowritten with Eldar Shafir. The book offers an astonishing look at the pervasive effects of scarcity — of food, of time, of attention — and how it affects your power to make good decisions. Bonus: Within the review, Sunstein surfaces a knockout quote from another TED speaker, economist Esther Duflo (watch the talk):

“We tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care [of] for you. And the poorer you are, the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life…. Stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track.”

It’s alive.

The new Apple iPad ad, titled “Alive,” debuted last night and features a gorgeous glimpse of the recently updated TED mobile app. The spot also highlights TED speaker Mathieu Lehanneur, a designer who looks to science and nature for inspiration for problem-solving objects. Lehanneur is the man behind the living air purifier Andrea— a space age terrarium that uses plants to metabolize toxins in the air — and Local River, a mash-up of an aquarium and herb garden for locavores. His designs marry the living and the synthetic in order to tackle environmental problems.

Mathieu Lehanneur: Science-inspired design

In his talk from TEDGlobal 2009, Lehanneur demoed a handful of his most fascinating creations — like a rolling ball that neutralizes noise pollution and a week-long antibiotic course all in one layered pill. But what has Lehanneur been working on since? According to his website, his latest invention is Isaac & Graham (named to honor Sir Isaac Newton and Alexander Graham Bell), an emergency phone for hikers that generates power by the dropping of a weight. In addition to a solo show at the Grand Hornu Museum in Belgium, Lehanneur has also designed a WikiBar for The Lab Store in Paris and Take Time!, a creation that is halfway between a pocket watch and a pendulum.

Communication coach Carmine Gallo has deconstructed Jobs’ job for BusinessWeek.com. A good primer for any speaker, with concrete, memorable examples. Read Gallo’s column, watch Jobs’ speech, or consider this cheat sheet: 1) Build up the presentation to something unexpected; 2) Stick to one theme per slide, and make them visually attractive; 3) Vary the speed and tone at which you speak to electrify the audience; 4) Three things are absolutely key: rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. 5) If you’re passionate about the idea or the product, show it.