Apple announced today it’s launching a brand-new research study — the Apple Health Study. But this one is different from its previous efforts in the space. Case in point: there’s no specific area of focus. Instead, the study will gather data from iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods to try and discover new relationships between different areas of health, both physical and mental.

From a research perspective, this is all well and good. But for gadget nerds, Apple also has a good track record of actually shipping several features out of its health research. The most recent example is the new hearing test feature in AirPods. According to Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, that feature was born out of research from Apple’s Hearing Study.

“We use these research studies not only to learn, but to drive and inform our decisions about what things to add to the product roadmap when we see that there’s science that supports building up this work,” says Desai, noting that the company has passed on implementing features where the science didn’t hold up.

The virtual study will appear in the Research app and is being conducted in conjunction with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. (Apple also partnered with the hospital for its Heart & Movement study.) Users who opt in to the study will not only contribute their data but also answer periodic survey questions about their at-home life and habits. The study will encompass topics including activity, aging, cardiovascular health, circulatory health, cognition, hearing, menstrual health, metabolic health, mobility, neurological health, respiratory health, and sleep. To start, the study is set to last about five years and could potentially be extended further.

If the goals seem nebulous, that’s partly because the scope and potential scale are much, much bigger than what you’d find in traditional clinical research studies. Apple’s first research project, the Apple Heart Study, amassed 400,000 participants. By contrast, most traditional studies have much smaller sample sizes, with larger ones having participants in the hundreds, maybe thousands — but not hundreds of thousands. Fewer studies still are able to track participants over long periods of time. Widening the scope and scale has the potential to uncover heretofore unknown connections. On the flip side, it’s hard to say what will come out of the Apple Health Study because this is one of the first times researchers will get to cross-examine such extensive and disparate datasets together.

“We anticipate we will likely find some signals that have previously just been missed because we haven’t had studies that are this broad, or we haven’t had studies that are this continuous. We haven’t looked longitudinally or at this level of granularity,” says Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who will serve as principal investigator on the Apple Health Study.

According to MacRae, insights from traditional research can often take a long time to become applicable in everyday life because researchers go in with a specific goal in mind. Meaning, they pick a population and a topic to study on day one and then are stuck with those decisions for potentially decades, even if the field of research itself changes within that time. Conversely, access to a huge and diverse cohort — basically, in this case, anyone who owns an Apple product — opens the door to the acceleration of discovery and progress.

“The more diverse and broad the age range, demographics, and other criteria, the better. We can find an initial signal, test and validate it, and associate it with more events. The more people that are in the study, the more events occur, and suddenly, we’re in a position to be able to really dramatically change the pace at which these things happen.”

Another potential benefit, says MacRae, is that the Apple Health Study’s broad scale could help researchers identify and fill in information gaps. One challenge of traditional clinical studies is that they tend to have a more limited pool of participants. For example, if a health study primarily consists of young, white men, the findings may not apply to women, children, older adults, or people of color. One real-life example is how women were rarely included in clinical trials between 1977 and 1993, leading to a massive gap in what we know about women’s health and serious disparities in healthcare. In this case, such information gaps wouldn’t necessarily be limited to sex. They could, MacRae says, include things like how time zones influence sleep patterns or even loneliness during specific seasons.

One hope is that the study may uncover ways to build more proactive features. For instance, detecting if an early change in hearing could reduce the risk of cognitive decline down the line. Desai also noted that features may not be limited to hardware, pointing to Focus modes as an example of software that users may not immediately consider to be health-related.

Desai noted that it’ll be a while before we see anything tangible from the Apple Health Study.

“I wouldn’t expect anything this year, just because that wouldn’t be scientifically possible,” she says, noting product development can also take two or three years on its own. The company’s sleep apnea feature for the Apple Watch, she says, took roughly five years. “It’s probably going to take a few years before these hit, but I definitely think the pipeline will be full.”