How Virgobit Leverages Polar Biosensing Data to Power Research-Grade Remote Health Monitoring

Overview

Based in Germany, Virgobit builds software platforms that integrate wearable devices and smartphones for home-based healthcare. To do that, the company needs devices that can accurately capture the body's most important signals, which is why they chose Polar sensors. The result is Spica, a platform that supports scientific and clinical teams in collecting and analyzing physiological and behavioral data from patients and participants, powering remote health monitoring for research and clinical applications worldwide.

The Solution

Spica is Virgobit’s flagship platform for remote, synchronized multimodal data collection. It is designed to bridge the gap between controlled clinical environments and real-world patient behavior. The platform has four key functionalities.

Spica: Key capabilities

• Advanced multimodal data collection: Enables synchronized collection of physiological, behavioral, and contextual data from wearable devices, smartphones, and research-grade sensors, including Polar devices.
• Real-world longitudinal research: Supports continuous or scheduled data collection beyond traditional clinical and laboratory environments, helping researchers capture health and behavior as they unfold in everyday life.
• Research-grade data collection: Designed for universities, hospitals, and research teams conducting clinical, neuroscience, and digital health studies with high-quality real-world data.
• Broad sensor ecosystem: Integrates Polar devices with a wide range of wearable, physiological, motion, and neuroscience sensors, enabling complementary data streams within a unified research environment.
• Smartphone-based assessments: Supports ecological momentary assessments (EMA), cognitive and motor tasks, participant questionnaires, and other smartphone-based assessments alongside sensor data.
• Mobile and research infrastructure: Available on iOS and Android, Spica offers both Standard and Research modes for different study requirements, supported by a comprehensive dashboard that enables researchers, scientists, and clinicians to configure studies, monitor data collection, and manage participants.
• Remote participant engagement: Supports notifications, assessments, feedback, and reward mechanisms to help researchers maintain participant engagement throughout longitudinal studies.
• AI-ready multimodal data: Provides multimodal datasets that can support advanced analysis and AI-based models, including approaches for deriving measures such as sleep and stress from physiological signals.

Data collection from wearable sensors and smartphones simultaneously

Polar H10, Polar 360, Polar Verity Sense, and selected Polar watches are fundamental components within the Spica ecosystem, providing high-quality cardiovascular and activity data that can be synchronized with additional physiological, neural, behavioral, and contextual data streams. Spica supports multimodal data collection across cardiovascular monitoring, EEG, movement sensing, sleep assessment, continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), mobile behavioral data, and other study-specific sensor integrations. This enables Polar-based studies to be extended with additional sensors for comprehensive multimodal data capture within a single framework.

Capturing a broad range of physiological and behavioral measures

Including HR, HRV, ECG, activity, accelerometery, sleep, EEG-derived metrics, behavioral responses, cognitive performance measures, and other study-specific digital biomarkers.

Providing a centralized dashboard

For participant management, real-time monitoring, remote study administration, multimodal data visualization and analysis, as well as AI-driven analytics for digital biomarker extraction and predictive modeling.

AI-powered analytics and digital biomarker discovery

Combines multimodal wearable and smartphone data with advanced analytical tools, including machine learning algorithms such as stress detection and sleep staging, as well as digital biomarker extraction, predictive analytics, and longitudinal health monitoring.

Enables real-time monitoring and experimental task delivery via mobile apps

Spica provides a configurable task framework for deploying standardized and study-specific experimental paradigms. Examples include Finger Tapping, Face Morph, Affect Labeling, and Monetary Gambling tasks, which can be synchronized with physiological and behavioral measurements to support multimodal neuroscience and clinical research.

What Polar Provides

Virgobit addresses a critical challenge in healthcare and research: How to collect accurate, continuous, high-quality physiological data outside clinical environments—across multiple devices and participants.

Through integration with Polar:

• Researchers gain validated, high-precision physiological data (e.g., heart rate, HRV, ECG) from Polar sensors
• Spica synchronizes Polar data with additional physiological, neural, behavioral, and smartphone-derived data streams—including EEG recordings, movement data, mobile assessments, experimental task performance, and other wearable sensors—enabling comprehensive multimodal assessments within a single synchronized ecosystem.
• Real-world, longitudinal studies are enabled that were previously difficult due to fragmented or clinic-bound data collection
• Polar devices act as a trusted physiological data source, enhancing the reliability and scientific value of Virgobit’s platforms.

How Virgobit and Polar Work Together

• Polar wearable devices (e.g., ECG belts, Verity Sense, watches) integrate directly into the Spica platform.
• Data from Polar sensors (HR, HRV, ECG, activity, sleep) is automatically captured and synchronized within Spica
• Spica combines Polar data with other inputs (EEG, motion, behavioral tasks) to provide a holistic view of human physiology and behavior

This integration supports clinical trials, neuroscience research, and remote patient monitoring. In collaborative research projects, Polar sensors are used within the Spica ecosystem to capture heart rate and activity data, supporting applications ranging from Parkinson’s disease research and affective disorder studies to pediatric anxiety interventions and brain–body interaction analysis.

More on Selected Projects

• Remote Data Collection Mobile App from Parkinsonian Patients (Polar 360)
• SFB/TRR 393: Trajectories of Affective Disorders (Polar 360)
• KIKAN: Interactive Therapy for Children with Anxiety Disorders (Polar 360)
• Brain-Body Biofeedback Training Platform (Polar H10)
• Mobile Platform for Simultaneous ECG and Motion Data Collection (Polar H10)

Why This Partnership Matters

• It extends Polar’s role into clinical research and digital health innovation
• Demonstrates research-grade validity of Polar biosensing technology
• Enables new healthcare and neuroscience use cases beyond sports
• Supports multimodal data collection and analysis across physiological, behavioral, and neurological domains.
• Positions Polar as a key enabler in remote and decentralized clinical trials