Across mobile platforms, smartwatch makers are eager to embrace the possibilities offered by health-related apps and services. After all, fitness trackers are a huge component of the current wearables market, and smartwatches allow manufacturers to pair a fitness tracker’s sensors with advanced software and communications capabilities. That all makes for a prime environment for gathering and analyzing all sorts of personal health data, bringing us the likes of Apple HealthKit and Google Fit. But Google has some even grander ambitions than just helping you lose that winter weight, and the company’s Google X research division has cooked-up an advanced wearable to assist researchers in conducting drug studies.

The wearable really steps up its sensor game beyond what we see in commercially available products, gathering data about skin temperature and environmental conditions in addition to the usual heart rate and pulse. The data collected offers researches far more (and hopefully higher-quality) information than they might hope to get from manually user-submitted reports, or be able to measure themselves.

While this particular wearable isn’t meant to ever be the sort of thing you’d order from the Google Store alongside Android Wear models, this project could well serve as a testing ground for future, more commercially oriented wearable tech. Will Android Wear start stepping up its sensor game as it moves into its second year of availability?

Source: Bloomberg
Via: Android Central