We are living in an era where unparalleled medical technological advancements have helped in improving the quality of lives of billions of people all over the world. Continuous advancements are being made that help to better understand the various diseases that still perplex us and to subsequently find their cure.
In this respect, Verily Life – a tech company owned by Google’s parent organization Alphabet—is at the forefront of bringing together technology and health care research in order to gain greater insights so that people can enjoy healthier lives.
Verily Life has recently developed a digital watch that tracks health data and has been designed specifically for use in clinical research.
Insights into the Digital Health Watch
The digital health watch developed by Verily Life is known simply as Study Watch. The watch represents a revolutionary new technology that can help medical researchers in gaining better a understanding of different diseases. The watch can detect sound and ambient light that allows it to measure electrodermal activity and heart rate. Also, the watch can measure movement and produce accurate ECG readings that can help reveal latent heart problems.
The watch looks similar to a wrist watch and features an e-ink type display. According to Verily Life, the watch can continuously and unobtrusively collect data from the study participants. Following are some of the key features of the digital heart watch:
- Multiple environmental and physiological sensors
- A powerful internal processor that can easily handle real time algorithms
- Large internal storage that can allow the watch to store about a week’s worth of raw data
- Robust firmware that supports user interface upgrades, new algorithms, and over-the-air updates
- Always-on display screen that shows the current time, date, and month
For the moment, Verily Life has not put the digital watch up for sale, but the team hopes that it will be used in large scale research projects in the future. Presently, the company will use the watch in conducting its own clinical research. The company’s baseline study aims to monitor about 10,000 individuals over the next five years. The research data will form the baseline of health data that can help in better comprehension of diseases. It is an ambitious project that includes tracking of glucose levels, heart attacks, cancer activities and much more.
Verily Life is not the only company that is working on a health watch that can measure vital statistics of the patients. Nokia that owns Whithings and Apple are both working on a similar health watches that can assist clinical research studies. These watches will probably not be put on sale for the public. Instead, they will be utilized in large research projects such as the Radboud University’s Personalized Parkinson’s Project and many others. It is hoped that the watches will play a pivotal role in introducing breakthrough treatments for various currently incurable diseases in the future.