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Alphabet's Verily begins offering stop-loss health insurance
Google's life sciences sibling is now selling insurance.
Alphabet’s Verily shows how its drive-thru COVID-19 testing sites work
Verily -- Alphabet's healthcare brand -- isn't just creating a website to help northern Californians determine whether they need a test for COVID-19. It's also piloting drive-thru testing. It has opened two sites, one in Riverside County and another in Sacramento County, and today, it shared a video that shows how the COVID-19 testing works.
Senators ask Alphabet how it will protect COVID-19 screening site data
Alphabet's COVID-19 screening site might serve as a relief to those eager to determine if they need to get tested, but it's also raising some privacy concerns in Congress. Five Democratic senators have sent letters to Vice President Mike Pence and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai asking if they've studied the potential for privacy and security holes in Verily's Baseline triage system. The politicians wanted to know if users will be asked to "forfeit" their data to participate, and if Google will be barred from either using the data for its own purposes or selling it to third parties.
Alphabet's Verily launches coronavirus screening service in California
Verily -- Google's sibling healthcare brand -- has launched a website that will help adults in northern California determine whether they need a test for coronavirus. The "triage" pilot is available to those in Santa Clara Country and San Mateo County, and asks users questions about their recent health and travel. The site will, if necessary, help users obtain a free test.
Google says nationwide coronavirus website is in development (updated)
President Trump misspoke when he said Google was developing a national screening and test result site for potential coronavirus patients (that's just Verily's Bay Area pilot for now), but there was apparently a degree of truth involved. In a series of clarifying tweets, Google said it was teaming with the US government on a "nationwide website" that would provide info about COVID-19 symptoms, risks and testing info. The company characterized this as separate from the Verily project and other coronavirus information efforts.
Verily's algorithm helps prevent eye disease in India
Verily's efforts to spot and prevent eye disease through algorithms are becoming more tangible. The Alphabet-owned company has revealed that its eye disease algorithm is seeing its first real-world use at the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India. The clinic screens patients by imaging their eyes with a fundus camera (a low-power microscope with an attached cam) and sending the resulting pictures to the algorithm, which screens for diabetic retinopathy and diabetic macular edema. Doctors could prevent the blindness that can come from these conditions by catching telltale signs they'd otherwise miss.
Alphabet's Verily is opening an opioid addiction center in Ohio
Alphabet's health data company Verily is mainly known for its devices, but now it's tackling one of the larger problems in the US through facilities. The company is teaming up with Kettering Health Network, Premier Health and Alexandria Real Estate Equities to establish OneFifteen, a "tech-enabled" campus in Dayton, Ohio that will help address opioid addictions. It'll include clinical services, housing for recovering patients and mixed-purpose buildings to help both patients and the local community, with Verily's technical know-how helping to "continually evolve" treatment.
Alphabet is exploring smart shoes that know when you fall
Alphabet's Verily isn't done finding new places for its health-oriented wearable tech. CNBC sources claim the firm has developed prototype smart shoes that measure movement and weight, and could detect when you've fallen -- not a novel concept, but still relatively rare. These wouldn't be fitness shoes, then. Instead, they could track rapid weight gain (a sign of congestive heart failure) or send an alert if you take a tumble to the ground. That last part could be particularly helpful for people who have mobility issues but still want a degree of independence.
Eyelid glucose sensor might pick up where Verily left off
Just because Alphabet's Verily shelved its glucose-monitoring contact lens doesn't mean you're stuck without an unintrusive way to manage diabetes. IEEE Spectrum has discovered a recent study that shows promise for Dutch startup Noviosense's own wearable glucose monitor, which measures tears by sitting in your lower eyelid. The spring-like coil was accurate enough that 95 percent of its data was either as good as blood or close enough to be acceptable. For contrast, previous studies suggested that tears might only have a 70 percent correlation at best.
Verily shelves its glucose-monitoring contact lens project
In 2014, Verily, Alphabet's life sciences subsidiary, teamed up with Alcon to develop a contact lens that could measure glucose levels in tears. The idea being that diabetics would have an easier, less invasive way of keeping track of their glucose levels. But the companies have now decided to shelve that project, as their work has shown that it's actually quite difficult to obtain consistently accurate measurements of glucose from tears.
Google AI can scan your eyes to predict heart disease
Alphabet's health science company Verily has announced a wide range of projects, from developing smartwatches made for medical studies to mass-producing infected mosquitoes to curb their population. Scientists from the division now have a new endeavor: Assessing heart disease risk by staring into patients' eyes.
Apple, Alphabet and Fitbit test FDA fast track for health apps
A few of the tech giants you know are about to get fast-track approval for their digital health efforts. The US Food and Drug Administration has named the companies involved in a recently-instituted "pre-certification" program that determines whether or not they meet baseline quality standards for health software. Apple, Fitbit, Samsung and Alphabet's Verily are among the firms that will help the FDA set the benchmarks and decide just how much information companies need to send if they've been pre-cleared. Depending on how the program fares, companies may get to send less information or even avoid certifying certain apps altogether.
Alphabet finalizes restructuring with a new company called XXVI
Back in 2015, Google announced that it was restructuring its company into multiple parts, with a new giant company called Alphabet to oversee all of Google's various businesses. The reasoning behind the move was to essentially separate out some of Google's "Other Bets" projects into their own entities, so that they would be valued separately from the core Google business. Today, Alphabet is finally wrapping up the reorg with the invention of a new company, called XXVI Holdings Inc. XXVI Holdings will be the umbrella encompassing those aforementioned "Other Bets" projects, which include Waymo, which comes up with self-driving tech, and Verily, which specializes in digital health and medical devices. Google, on the other hand, is changing from a corporation to an LLC, because it's now part of a holding company instead of a listed public company. As a reminder, Google is still home to the business's bread-and-butter units like Gmail, search and YouTube. Despite the changes though, it's really just a formality. "We're updating our corporate structure to implement the changes we announced with the creation of Alphabet in 2015," said Gina Weakley Johnson, an Alphabet spokesperson. It won't affect shareholder control, operations, or management. As for why it's called XXVI? Well, it's 26 -- the number of letters in the alphabet -- in Roman numerals.
Verily's answer to Fresno's mosquito woes is 20 million more
Last year, executives of Alphabet's life science arm, Verily, discussed a project aimed at controlling invasive mosquito populations, the results of which are now going into effect. To combat the mosquito species that carries viruses like Zika and dengue, the company will release a ton of bacteria-infected male mosquitoes in Fresno, California where they should drastically bring down numbers of wild mosquitoes.
Alphabet starts collecting health info to better predict disease
It didn't take long for Alphabet's Verily to get its watch-based health study off the ground. The life sciences company has launched its 4-year research initiative, Baseline, to potentially spot early signs of diseases before obvious symptoms appear. Verily's health-tracking Study Watch plays a central role, of course, as it will track everything from heart rate to ECGs to the skin's electrical conductivity. However, that's just one piece of the puzzle -- the team will look at numerous other factors to see where disease begins.
Alphabet's Verily details its research-focused health watch
Google has made a smartwatch, but not the kind you might expect. Verily, the health organisation owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has (finally) announced its 'Study Watch' for medical research purposes. It doesn't run Android Wear, nor does it help you manage the notifications on your phone. Instead, it passively captures health data "critical to the success of continuous care platforms and clinical research," including heart rate, electrodermal activity (the skin's ability to conduct electricity) and body movement. It can also produce an ECG, a recording of the heart's electrical activity, which can sometimes reveal heart problems.
Nikon and Verily team up to fight diabetes-related eye disease
Verily, Google's former Life Sciences division, teamed up with a French pharmaceutical company to help treat diabetes just a few months ago. Now, it has joined forces with Nikon to enhance the screening process for diabetic retinopathy and macular edema -- diabetes-related eye diseases and two of the leading causes of blindness in adults. They want to create machine learning-enabled retinal imaging technologies that can detect the diseases in their early stages. That way, doctors can step in and prevent the patients from going blind whenever possible.
Alphabet's autofocusing contact lens won't be tested in 2016
Bad news if you were hoping that Google's (now Alphabet's) smart contact lenses would be available relatively soon: they're running into some hurdles. Novartis, which is partnering with Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences on an autofocusing lens that addresses farsightedness, says it won't make its goal of testing the technology in 2016. It's "too early to say" when trials would start, a spokeswoman explains to Reuters. It's also uncertain when tests for the other lens, which monitors blood sugar levels, would likely begin.
Alphabet is working to squash the Zika virus, too
There are a few ways to kill off a pest: eliminate its food supply, or, make sure it can't effectively procreate. Since the pest in question for this post is mosquitos, the former solution isn't an option. So, Verily, the life-science division of Alphabet Inc., is addressing the Zika-carrier with a spin on the latter, according to MIT Technology Review.
Verily's wearable microscope sees beneath your skin
UCLA and Verily, Google Alphabet's life sciences division, has developed a wearable microscope that could help doctors in the near future. The device is designed to track fluorescent biomarkers inside the skin, a vital tool used to detect certain cancers and to monitor the delivery of drugs inside a person's body. These biomarkers are, essentially, glow-in-the-dark dyes that medical professionals can follow as they journey around your veins.
