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Enlarge / The Verily Study Watch, strategically photographed to not show how thick it is.

Alphabet's Life Sciences division, called Verily, is giving the world a peek at its health-focused smartwatch. The Google sister company introduced the "Verily Study Watch" on its blog today, calling it an "investigational device" that aims to "passively capture health data" for medical studies.

Many wearables technically capture health data with simple heart-rate sensors, but Verily's watch aims to be a real medical device.The blog post saysthe devicecan track"relevant signals for studies spanning cardiovascular, movement disorders, and other areas." The Study Watch does this by usingelectrocardiography(ECG) and by measuringelectrodermal activity and inertial movements.

The Study Watch beams this datato Verily's cloud infrastructure for all sorts of big-data analysis. Study Watch seems to be the Verily hardware platform of the future, with the company saying the watch will be used in several studies being run by Verily and its partners. The company specifically said the watch would be used in "Baseline Study," a Verily project that aims to measure what a healthy human looks like, and the "Personalized Parkinson's Project."

With the goal of Study Watch to be an unobtrusiveway to collect medical data, battery life is a concern. Verily promises "a long battery life of up to one week" for the device. The "always-on" display seems to be e-ink, which ispractically a requirement for any watch with a week-long battery life. Verily alsogave the watch enough storage to keep "weeks' worth of raw data" encrypted on the device, removing the need to frequently sync with cloud servers. There also isn't much in the way of user features: Study Watch displays the time and date, and that's it for now. The watch is capable of getting over-the-air software updates, though, so the interface might change.

There's no word on price, as the Study Watch is "not for sale." It's just something that will be given out to participants in Verily's medical studies.

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Alphabet's Verily shows off health-focused smartwatch - Ars Technica