Verily and Samsung have announced a collaboration aimed at accelerating clinical research using wearable data, a development highlighted during the HIMSS Conference in Las Vegas on Monday. The partnership integrates user data from Samsung Galaxy smartwatches into Verily’s precision health platform, Verily Pre, enabling pharmaceutical companies and government agencies to conduct studies and monitor participants remotely.
Researchers will be able to gather continuous health data from participants wearing Samsung devices, measuring metrics such as heart rate, sleep patterns, and physical activity. This information will flow back to Verily’s data platform, allowing pharmaceutical companies and regulators to track patient health over time and rapidly analyze real-world data.
According to Myoung Cha, Verily’s product director, consumer wearables are evolving into “true instruments of good faith research.” Cha, who previously led health strategic initiatives at Apple, emphasized that wearable devices have progressed from simple fitness trackers to sophisticated health sensors capable of meeting the quality and reliability required for regulated clinical studies.
To achieve this, Cha noted the importance of not only high-quality hardware but also a robust platform to ingrain, harmonize, and preserve the data, ensuring it complies with research protocols. This allows for meaningful analysis and discovery once the data is included in broader research datasets.
He pointed out that Samsung’s smartwatches could soon help in identifying new digital biomarkers, citing ongoing work by Verily in studying conditions such as Parkinson’s disease using wearable data.
Cha highlighted that the partnership will also provide researchers with raw signals from the devices, including photoplethysmography and motion data from accelerometers and gyroscopes embedded in the Galaxy smartwatches. This capability enables deeper analysis beyond summary statistics like step counts or heart rates, facilitating the creation of algorithms to detect subtle health changes.
The primary goal of this collaboration is to simplify the use of smartwatch data for pharmaceutical companies during clinical trials. “The target customer, if you will, for both of us as we assemble this bundled solution, is the pharmaceutical sector. We are trying to reduce the friction in adoption,” Cha explained.
The partners aim to deliver a comprehensive system that allows pharmaceutical research teams to deploy wearable devices in studies, collect remote patient data, and analyze results within a single platform.
Photo: Guido Mieth, Getty Images
