by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 14, 2017

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, expects to close in the second half of 2017 the final portion of a “non-controlling” investment in life science company Verily from Temasek, a Singapore-based investment firm.

The first investment in Verily, a company working on projects like smart lenses and glucose monitoring, came in January. In aggregate, the firm will pay $800 million in cash, according to the company’s latest 10-K SEC filing.

On Friday, Verily unveiled a health watch for research.

The company calls this wearable device a Study Watch. The watch supports physiological and environmental sensors designed to measure signals from cardiovascular and movement disorders. It also examines electrocardiogram, heart rate, electrodermal activity and inertial movements.

A processor supports real-time algorithms on the device. It has a battery life of up to one week and can compress weeks-worth of data making it easy to store information on the watch. It also connects to the cloud, but because the device supports health data, all data is encrypted.

David He, technical lead; Tushar Parlikar, product manager; and Harry Xiao, technical program manager at Verily, explain in a blog post that the Study Watch will be used in several studies.

They include the Personalized Parkinson’s Project, a two-year study in the Netherlands that will explore the impact of the disease, and a forthcoming Baseline study, which will track thousands of health people over time to explore the transition between health and disease.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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