Alphabet's Verily Secretly Develops Low-Power Health-Tracking Smartwatch with ECG Capabilities

Verily, the life sciences company spun out from Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is working on developing a health-tracking smartwatch and has already produced “hundreds” of prototype devices.

According to Antonio Regalado, an author for MIT Technology Review magazine, this smartwatch features a digital watch face and a circular display similar to an e-ink screen.

Brian Otis, Chief Technology Officer of Verily, stated that this smartwatch does not require daily charging. The company is also developing its own chips in an effort to reduce power consumption.

Other smartwatches, including the Apple Watch and most devices running Google’s Android Wear operating system, utilize LCD or OLED displays. While capable of displaying color, they consume significantly more power than e-ink screens.

“Its biggest selling point is low energy consumption,” Otis told MIT Technology Review.

This smartwatch is also equipped with medical sensors capable of collecting various physiological data from the human body. One of these sensors can measure ECG (electrocardiogram), a feature not available in other smartwatches, such as the Apple Watch.

However, don’t expect to be able to walk into a Best Buy store and purchase this smartwatch anytime soon. These smartwatches appear to have been developed for medical researchers, primarily for use in clinical medical research. Verily is working to promote its integrated service—combining hardware and big data analytics—to support clinical research among medical researchers.

Alphabet, the parent company of Verily, is not the only tech giant seeking a share of the healthcare market.

Startup AliveCor has begun selling a portable ECG sensor that works with an iPhone app. It has also developed an Apple Watch ECG band, which is currently awaiting approval from relevant regulatory authorities. The company is now led by former Google executive Vic Gundotra.

Apple is also closely monitoring this field. It has launched several software frameworks, such as ResearchKit, which is specifically targeted at clinical researchers.

According to a recent report by Bloomberg, Apple is preparing to expand the capabilities of its health-tracking software and smartwatch, with the aim of enabling data collected by Apple products to assist physicians in making diagnoses.

However, Apple may not add medical sensors to its consumer smartwatches. This is because Apple believes that “glucose meters or blood pressure sensors would only benefit a small subset of users.”

Source: BI Chinese