Wearables player updates on sensing platform for clinical trials

Wearable technology company Shimmer Research is providing updates on its Verisense wearable sensing platform for clinical trials, and OWEAR, the Open Wearables Initiative, which it co-founded in 2019 with Dr. Vincent van Hees and Nextbridge Health at the DPHARM virtual conference.

The Verisense platform was built from the ground up to monitor clinical trial participants’ activity and sleep levels remotely. It was developed to satisfy the needs of, and place minimum burden on, all the stakeholders – sponsors, clinical research organisations (CROs), trial sites, and participants. 

Verisense provides sponsors with raw sensor data from clinical trial participants, allowing them to drill down to resolve any anomalies and also to reanalyse their results whenever algorithms used to interpret specific motions are refined. 

It takes less than five minutes for clinical trial site staff to set up each new participant on the Verisense platform and they receive alerts if the participant’s sensor is not being worn correctly, the base station is unplugged, or the sensor’s power is running low. As a result, Verisense reduces the amount of participant-researcher time required to run the clinical study. 

The Verisense sensor was also developed to be a low-stress, no-hassle device for clinical trial participants. It does not require regular charging – its battery lasts for up to six months – and its data is uploaded automatically to a remote cloud platform without any patient involvement. It is also a lightweight, low profile, water-resistant device.

Geoffrey Gill, president of Shimmer Americas, said: “We are proud to continue our support of DPHARM and delighted to have this opportunity to connect virtually with medical researchers around the world and to share our latest Verisense and OWEAR advances. While social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic is keeping us apart, we are finding new ways of working together, and technologies like Verisense are helping to enable the adoption of telehealth measures at rates barely imagined a year ago.”