One of Alphabet's other divisions has made its own health-themed smartwatch

While Google and its third-party partners have been quite busy launching Android Wear-based smartwatches over the past few years, another company under Google’s parent organization Alphabet has been quietly working on a smartwatch of its own. Today, that company, Verily, announced some of the details of that device, called the Study Watch.

Verily’s main business is to develop and release tools to help doctors collect health data, and that’s what the Study Watch is all about. In a blog post, Verily says the display on this watch only shows the day and time to the user, so you won’t be able to run any apps or even see how far you have walked in one day.

Instead, it’s what is in the watch that’s important. Verily says it contains a number of sensors designed to collect data, including a person’s heart rate, electrodermal activity, and inertial movements. All of the data is collected and encrypted on the device for security, and after that it’s uploaded to Verily’s cloud servers for processing using machine learning.

The blog post doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics for the watch’s hardware, but it does say it’s been designed to last up to a week on a single charge. It also has an unnamed but powerful processor, along with a lot of internal storage to keep all of that encrypted data secure.

Verily says it plans to use the Study Watch in at least a couple of projects, including one that is looking to help identify any patterns in the progression of Parkinson’s disease. It will also be used to collect data to create a “baseline” level of health in order to explore how a normal healthy person transitions into one that is sick. Needless to say, the Study Watch will not be sold to the general public.