Alphabet’s health division made a better smartwatch than Google could
Alphabet’s life sciences spinoff, Verily, has developed
a health-tracking watch that will be used in observational and
longitudinal health studies, the company said in a blog post today.
Appropriately named the Study Watch, the watch has a
simple, sleek look and has “multiple physiological and environmental
sensors, designed to measure relevant signals for studies spanning
cardiovascular, movement disorders, and other areas,” Verily said. It
has a low-power, e-paper-like display, and Verily claims that its
battery life last a week. Wearers’ health data is encrypted on the
device and processed in the cloud.
Interestingly, many of the design decisions around the
Study Watch seem to have been made with the intention of just get people
to wear it continuously, something that has been a challenge
for makers of consumer wearables. Aside from week-long battery life,
Verily says that the watch’s large internal storage and data compression
mean that it will store data for weeks at a time and wearers won’t have
to sync it very often. It has an always-on display, so it shows the
time just like an analog watch would. On the downside, it doesn’t seem
to show any kind of notifications, just the time and occasional
instructional information.
If you’re reading this and thinking, This looks smarter than that new Android Wear smartwatch,
you’re out of luck for now: Verily emphasized in its blog post that the
watch is not for sale, and is being used for research purposes only.
The company said it will be used in a multi-year study around Parkinson’s disease and another study, called Baseline, that will examine 10,000 participates over five years to understand “the transition from health to disease.”
The article was published on : theverge
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