Alphabet is the parent company of google. Its Life Sciences sector has debuted a stylish, unobtrusive smartwatch with robust health tracking capabilities created for investigation purposes. It data capture is passive and seamless to ensure the success of continuous care platforms and clinical research. The device will not be available for purchase and day to day use. According to the official blogpost of Verily, “Study Watch is an investigational device and is not for sale.”
Verily Study Watch includes sensors for monitoring health parameters for various research based studies. These include electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, electrodermal activity and inertial movements. These complex datasets are essentials of any clinical or observational study.
To ensure adequate compliance during longitudinal studies, Study Watch comes with a long battery life of up to one week. To further save battery, the smartwatch has a low power, high resolution display. It’s always on, but will only show the time and specific instructions, with no other data fed back to the user.
Its large internal storage and data compression features let he device save raw data over weeks and doesn’t need data sync as frequently. It has a powerful processor to run real-time algorithms. All its data has been encrypted for privacy. The encrypted data is then uploaded and processed in the cloud using Verily’s backend algorithms and machine learning tools.
The device has already been destined to be used the multi-year Personalized Parkinson’s Project, to highlight the pattern of disease progression overtime and help clinicians come with more personalized management options. Â Verily will also be used in the Baseline study. It is a longitudinal study involving 10,000 participants over five years to study the transitions between health and disease.
Though, Study Watch is neither made for consumers nor available for them; it has features that can serve as the potential sample tools for other makers to learn from. Verily might not become a mainstream devices, but definitely it has great features to be adapted by other startups. Even Google can feed Verily’s tech and tracking systems in its Android watches overtime to provide more robust health readings to its customers.
