Project Baseline — Update
It’s been almost two months since I began my four year journey with Verily’s Project Baseline and I am counting down the months. If you recall from my first post, I spent two days at Stanford getting poked, prodded, scanned, x-rayed, and analyzed. Fortunately, one of my besties works for Stanford on the project and I got to have lunch with her both days.
I successfully completed and sent in the poopsicle required as part of the study although that was not without complications from a shipping logistics perspective (we are overlooking the totally gross factor of this right now and the fact that my neighbor who is also participating totally overshared about his experience with this).
I had issues with the hub that is supposed to communicate the data from my watch to Verily HQ for aggregation and analysis. Customer service was great and sent a new one that I have yet to plug in. The one I have started working properly (I don’t have to unplug and plug back in each time I want to sync the watch).
I have yet to see any of my baseline data and the app is totally useless. And, really, I now wear two watches…my Apple watch (below…gen1 apparently) that provides me with value and functionality and the Google watch (below) which really just needs to be the size of a FitBit so I can wear it on the same wrist as my Apple watch so I look like less of a dork.
I dutifully do the required EKG on the watch each day.
And the big excitement was that they wanted me to do a 14 day sleep program where each day I answer a series of questions including when I go to sleep, how long it takes me, when I wake up, if I wake up at night and how many times, if I did certain things (the list remains the same is doesn’t include things that I think should be included), and a few other things. It’s really simple and ridiculous in my opinion. If an actual sleep specialist (doctor) was involved in the creation of this mini-study, they should be fired. It still seems as if technologists are leading this and not medical professionals.
My confidence continues to wane on this clinical trial.
Today I watched a webinar put on by CBInsights on what Apple is up to with regards to Healthcare and right now my money is on them. Apple is getting it. Verily’s approach appears to be somewhat arrogant but maybe I am missing something.
Hopefully Verily gets its act together and provides me with some data and the ability to enter some journal data so they can take some contextual data and align with the data they are gathering from me daily and annually. I have no way to enter that I am walking 4–5 miles each day or that I am now doing Invisalign. Both of these are going to impact aspects of my health.
Oh, and the thing they noted during my eye exam, no one has followed up with me regarding the issue. This is both concerning and irritating at the same time.
So, 46 months to go and counting. Hopefully I make it. I was super excited about being a part of this but my confidence level in Verily’s ability to actually do something with this data is pretty damn low.
But they got into the FDA’s SaMD (software as a medical device) pre-certification pilot program so they must be doing something right. We’ll see.
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