14 DAY TRIAL // Stephen S. Ashley has launched Biostatistics 1.0 for iPad, an app that provides descriptive statistics and statistical tests and procedures of interest primarily to students and researchers in the biological and medical sciences.
Stephen S. Ashley started his professional life as an Oxford-trained lawyer practicing in San Francisco and ended up dividing his time between providing flight instruction at the Oakland International Airport, and writing apps for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
His latest work, Biostatistics for iPad, provides tests and procedures, including interval data (normally distributed populations), nominal data, ordinal data, and survival time data.
According to its creator, the provided tests and procedures should also prove useful to those who draw inferences about large populations from measurements taken from random samples.
Using the $24.99 app doesn’t seem a breeze. Then again, Biostatistics is not the field you’d normally consider anything to be easy as pie.
That said, Ashley has posted an extensive set of instructions on biostatisticsapp.com for those looking to tap the power of this tool, as well as a video tutorial with comprehensive examples.
The developer plans to update his app with a bunch of enhancements.
While not providing a timeframe for that, he notes that future versions of Biostatistics should include: graphical display of linear regressions; graphical display of survival curves; multiple comparison procedures for the analysis of variance and similar tests; comparison of correlations; analysis of sample size; analysis of power; standard error of the estimate of a proportion; z-test; and Fisher exact test.
A Biostatistics Student Edition is also awaiting approval by Apple’s Review Board, Ashley says.
“In order to make the Biostatistics app available to students and to give all potential purchasers of the Biostatistics app an opportunity to try the program before purchasing it, you may install the Biostatistics Student Edition, which is available for free on the App Store,” Ashley explains on his web site.
This free edition provides the basic biostatistics procedures, including all the procedures in Biostatistics 1.0 except for Kaplan-Meier survival curves, the developer notes.
The Student Edition of Biostatistics will also not allow sending data or reports via email.