Shimmer Research and ClearSky Medical Diagnostics announced that they are joining forces to bring a new level of analytic capabilities to the use of wearable sensors in clinical research. The partnership of these two wearable technology giants will employ Shimmer's Verisense™ wearable sensors platform, which the company designed specifically for use in clinical research, with ClearSky algorithms and machine learning to transform wearables data into actionable insights for central nervous system (CNS) diseases.
For a reliable capturing biometric data that are accurate and complete, Verisense comes to play here. Worn on the wrist, the Verisense inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor can monitor activity and sleep seamlessly. However, people can only use Verisense for any IMU application with up to seven sensors worn on different parts of a participant's body, making it invaluable for studying complex musculoskeletal or neurological conditions, including dystonia and epilepsy.
As for ClearSky Medical Diagnostics, it specializes in developing technologies for the diagnosis and monitoring of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions. Its clinically validated medical devices have been used in medical centers worldwide and in clinical traits to demonstrate the efficacy of new drugs. The technical team of ClearSky has more than 15 years of experience analyzing clinical trial data and has developed a range of machine learning technologies to meet the current and future clinical needs.
Co-founder of ClearSky Medical Diagnostics, Dr. Stephen Smith, said that the Verisense platform is indeed a breakthrough for conducting clinical research. It can provide continuous raw data from wearables needs for sophisticated algorithms, yet places almost no burden on the participant or the clinical site. It has multiple layers of redundancy and quality checking to ensure that high-quality data are collected without interruption.
Geoff Gill, president of Shimmer Americas, said that ClearSky's algorithms could be used with Verisense data right away. However, the excitement is all about the potential for their clinical research customers to leverage ClearSky's experience and datasets to develop endpoints for a wide variety of CNS disorders based on Verisense data. ClearSky has taken raw motion data and transformed it with machine learning into actionable insights for physicians in a wide range of applications. This experience is ideally suited to develop endpoints for diseases like Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis, Huntington's, and many others using real-world data.
Gill explained further that thousands of researchers have been using Shimmer sensors for more than ten years to develop algorithms to understand the data from wearable sensors. By capturing continuous raw data, the Verisense platform allows them to leverage tens of thousands of person-years of research.
