Alphabet Verily begins research on 10,000 patients to 'map human health'

Alphabet's health-focused moonshot Verily is launching Project Baseline — a project to both track long-term health of 10,000 people, and to create a map of human health.

Launched today, Alphabet and Verily are teaming with Duke University and Stanford Medicine for the program. Around 10,000 participants will be enrolled at a half a dozen study sites in California and North Carolina.

The study participants will span a range of human health, including both perfectly healthy and fit individuals, as well as those suffering from or with a high risk of diabetes and heart disease or other chronic diseases.

Verily will provide the "Study Watch" to participants. The watch isn't intended for wide consumer use, and isn't for sale outside the study.

The Study Watch is a functional watch, but is a dedicated device and lacks niceties for users like the Apple Watch beyond simple time-telling. It includes sensors for electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, electrodermal activity, and inertial movements and can store six weeks of data collected from the sensors. Verily notes that the data is encrypted o the watch.

As a benefit for participants, Verily will sequence the genomes of participants, to see if there are genetic pre-dispositions for disease and illness not yet discovered. All results gleaned from the study, including the data gathered from the genome study, will be returned to the participants.

Doctors involved in the study caution that like with most wide-ranging studies, that results will take time. Duke Professor of Medicine Adrian Hernandez believes that it will be "at least five years" before study data is useful to researchers and the wider population.

Project Baseline appears to be taking a slightly different approach to research from a hardware perspective than Apple's HealthKit using the Apple Watch.

It isn't yet clear how the monitoring devices differ between the Apple Watch and the Study Watch. Regardless of the differences, both study methods require user input beyond the sensors on the wearable through questionnaires and surveys presented to the user.

Apple's HealthKit is also in use and being evaluated at both Duke and Stanford. Currently underway, in January Stanford University is offering to hand out up to 1,000 Apple Watches and up to $10,000 in funding to instructors and members of the faculty, as part of a new program to find innovative ways to use the Apple Watch in healthcare. Stanford also used the technology for diabetes medical trials in 2014, and a cardiovascular study in 2015.

Verily is seeking participants for the study at its website. Users outside the geographical areas that the study is launching in are invited to "build a Baseline Profile" to contribute to the map of human health.

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16 Comments

Soli 9 Years · 9981 comments

About 7 years ago

sog35 said:

who wants to live forever!
who wants to live Forever!
highlander

pipe dream google at it again.

please tell us what causes hiccups first before we try to solve immortality

1) I wondered who would find fault with Google for trying to better our health. If thiis was about Apple 'mapping human health' you'd have had a very different comment.

2) We know what causes hiccups. It's an involuntary contraction of the diaphragm muscle. What we don't know are all the catalysts for this myoclonic jerk and how to control it.

sockrolid 14 Years · 2789 comments

10,000 people are about to be mercilessly spammed with health-based ads.
Just watch.

gatorguy 13 Years · 24627 comments

sockrolid said:

10,000 people are about to be mercilessly spammed with health-based ads.
Just watch.

There are no ads involved. Silly comment.

sog35 said:

Soli said:

sog35 said:

who wants to live forever!
who wants to live Forever!
highlander

pipe dream google at it again.

please tell us what causes hiccups first before we try to solve immortality

1) I wondered who would find fault with Google for trying to better our health. If thiis was about Apple 'mapping human health' you'd have had a very different comment.

2) We know what causes hiccups. It's an involuntary contraction of the diaphragm muscle. What we don't know are all the catalysts for this myoclonic jerk and how to control it.

come on brah. You and I both know Google is doing this just to sell more ads. People live longer = more ads.

Of course they are, and Tesla is just trying to sell more cars, but that doesn't mean their efforts aren't leading to safer driving.

We still don't know what causes hiccups. you described what happens when some one hiccups, but not what causes the diaphragm muscle to contract involunarily in the first place.
I described it correctly. We know why you hiccup. We also know why you make the sound in which it derives its imitative name. What we know lesser of are the catalysts involved with the nerve sending a signal to the diaphragm, or why there's a need to spasm in the first place, why it usually stops on its own, or how to stop it safely. One day we could get an anti-hiccup pill that safely puts an end to it, but I doubt it since there's probably no real money in it for research.

Also, a pharmaceutical company spending money on research so "people live longer," doesn't invalidate their work because they make money off the drug.

This is a good thing!

gatorguy said:

sockrolid said:

10,000 people are about to be mercilessly spammed with health-based ads.
Just watch.

There are no ads involved. Silly comment.

But then people live longer so Google can then have more time to inundate them with ads. This is where he draws his line in the sand that Google is evil. LOL