| The skinny
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. Wearables are becoming research-grade devices
Myoung Cha — Verily's chief product officer and 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. Integrating wearable data into pharma R&D
The overarching goal of the collaboration is to make it easier for pharma companies to use smartwatch data in clinical trials, Cha stated. "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. — By Katie Adams | 
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