In truth And Samsung are partnering to accelerate clinical research using wearable data, the companies announced Monday at the HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas.
Businesses integrate user data from Samsung Galaxy smartwatches into Verily’s precision health platform, Verily Pre, so pharmaceutical companies and government agencies can conduct studies and monitor participants remotely.
Researchers will be able to collect ongoing health data from study participants wearing Samsung watches, including metrics such as heart rate, sleep and physical activity. Information will flow back into Verily’s data platform, allowing pharmaceutical companies and regulators to track patient health over time and quickly analyze real-world data.
Consumer wearables are becoming “real bona fide research tools,” according to Myoung Cha, Verily’s chief product officer.
Cha – who is the former head of strategic health initiatives at Apple – said wearables have evolved from simple fitness trackers to devices with sophisticated health sensors that achieve the quality and reliability needed for regulated clinical studies.
“I think to bring this to life requires not only quality hardware, but also a platform like ours to ingest that data, to harmonize it, to curate it, to make sure it complies with protocols or research rules – so that by the time it lands in a larger research set, the data can be easily used to interpret the results and generate discoveries and insights,” he explained.
Cha noted that Samsung’s watches could soon help researchers identify new digital biomarkers, emphasizing the work has actually already been done study diseases like Parkinson’s using wearable data.
He also highlighted that the partnership will give researchers access to raw signals from the devices, such as photoplethysmography and motion data from Galaxy Watches’ accelerometers and gyroscopes.
Essentially, this allows researchers and developers to go beyond summary statistics like steps or heart rate and analyze the raw data points that power digital biomarkers. These data streams could help them create algorithms that can detect subtle changes in health, Cha said.
The overarching goal of the collaboration is to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to use data from smartwatches in clinical trials, he said.
“The target customer, if you will, for both of us as we put this bundled solution together is the pharmaceutical industry. We’re trying to reduce friction in adoption,” Cha remarked.
The partners hope to offer pharmaceutical research teams an end-to-end system to deploy wearable devices in studies, collect patient data remotely, and then analyze the results, all within a single platform.
Photo: Guido Mieth, Getty Images
