In March 2015, Apple promised to change the way medical research could be done. They launched ResearchKit, which could turn millions of iPhones around the world into a “powerful tool for medical research,” the company said at the time.

Since then, ResearchKit — software that gives would-be app developers a library of coding to create health apps on the iPhone and Apple Watch — has spawned a number of studies: One team has used it to create an app to track Parkinson’s symptoms; another is trying out a screening protocol for autism. A third helps people inventory the moles on their skin and evaluate how they have changed over time.

Many of these apps have been downloaded tens of thousands of times, benefitting from Apple’s own huge scale. “Virtually overnight, the research studies that we launched became some of the largest in history,” said Jeff Williams, then Apple’s senior vice president of operations, at an Apple event in March 2016.

But much of the early research scientists were doing with ResearchKit wasn’t clinical in nature; rather it simply studied the feasibility of using mobile apps to collect health data.

Now, however, ResearchKit seems to be on the verge of becoming medically useful. In recent months scientists have published new data on seizures, asthma attacks, and heart disease using the platform. And scientists are already looking ahead to the next milestone for the technology: Hacking our ubiquitous mobile devices to become potentially lifesaving medical monitors.

Studying — and soon, predicting — seizures

For epilepsy patients and their doctors, precise answers to standard questions can be hard to get. For example: how many seizures happened in the last month? How many doses of epilepsy medication were skipped? Some patients try to remember, others keep journals or charts; those in a recent Johns Hopkins study were the first to use a ResearchKit app to do so — while also sending the numbers to Dr. Gregory Krauss and his colleagues to help them study seizures as a whole.

For the past two years, Krauss has collected data from participants before, after — and even during — seizures. If the users think they’re about to have a seizure, they can open the app on their watch and begin tests to measures their memory along with their state of awareness; if they stop responding to the test, they’re presumed to have lost awareness until they start responding again. That data is coupled with heart rate and accelerometer data.

The team’s results were the first to use surveys taken immediately after seizures to document epilepsy triggers — a feat that would have been impossible with previous research methods. Sleepless nights, missed medication doses, and stress were all found to contribute to likelihood of seizure, according to data presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting on April 27. Researchers plan to soon submit the data for peer-reviewed publication and join just a handful of other ResearchKit teams who have published.

Read more: Technology companies are racing to track patients’ behavior in real time

And Krauss and his team are already working on the ambitious next stage of their research. They’ve begun analyzing the data they’ve collected to create a seizure detector that aims to warn participants before the terrifying — and potentially dangerous — event sets in.

The EpiWatch app, running in the background on a smartwatch, would use physiological data to detect a seizure and alert its wearer. That could be a huge deal for people who have epilepsy, as Shaina Mims described in Apple’s promotional video. Mims said she worried about having a seizure while driving — but a seizure detector could allow her or her loved ones to ensure that she’s in a safe place before a seizure hits.

Krauss says the detection function could be available to users of the app by autumn 2017.

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