Verily and Samsung are teaming up to accelerate clinical research using wearable data, the companies announced Monday at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas.
The companies are integrating user data from Samsung Galaxy smartwatches into Verily’s precision health platform, Verily Pre, so pharma companies and government agencies can run studies and monitor participants remotely.
Researchers will be able to collect continuous health data from study participants wearing Samsung watches, including metrics such as heart rate, sleep and physical activity. The information will flow back into Verily’s data platform, allowing pharma companies and regulators to track patients’ health over time and quickly analyze real-world data.
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Consumer wearables are becoming “real, bonafide research-grade instruments,” according to Myoung Cha, Verily’s chief product officer.
Cha — who is the former head of health strategic initiatives at Apple — said wearables have evolved from basic fitness trackers into devices with sophisticated health sensors that are reaching the quality and reliability needed for regulated clinical studies.
“I think to bring that to life, it requires not just great hardware, but a platform like ours to ingest that data, to harmonize it, to curate it, to make sure it’s compliant with research protocols or rules — so that by the time that it lands into a broader research set, the data actually can be readily used to interpret results and to generate findings and insights,” he explained.
Cha noted that Samsung’s watches could soon help researchers identify new digital biomarkers, pointing to work Verily has already done studying conditions like Parkinson’s disease using wearable data.
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He also pointed out that the partnership will give researchers access to raw device signals, such as photoplethysmography and motion data from the Galaxy watches’ accelerometers and gyroscopes.
Essentially, this allows researchers and developers to move beyond summary stats like steps or heart rate and analyze the raw data points that power digital biomarkers. These data streams could help them create algorithms that detect subtle changes in health, Cha said.
The overarching goal of the collaboration is to make it easier for pharma companies to use smartwatch data in clinical trials, he declared.
“The target customer, if you will, for both of us, as we stitch together this bundled solution, is pharma. We’re trying to lower the friction in adoption,” Cha remarked.
The partners hope to give pharma research teams an end-to-end system for deploying wearable devices in studies, collecting the patient data remotely and then analyzing the results — all within a single platform.
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