As IBM Corp. has demonstrated with its Watson artificial intelligence, a sufficiently large trove of medical data can help diagnose even the most elusive conditions. The problem is that the necessary information is often difficult to come by, which is why Alphabet Inc. has set out to collect its own.

Verily Life Sciences LLC, the search giant’s medical subsidiary, today launched an ambitious clinical study that seeks to establish a well-defined reference of what exactly constitutes good health. Project Baseline, as the initiative is appropriately called, appears to be the successor to a low-key data gathering initiative that the company announced in 2014 and involved 175 volunteers. This time, Verily is looking for about 10,000 participants.

To help with recruiting, Verily has teamed up with the Duke University School of Medicine and Stanford Medicine. The schools will start enrolling patients for Project Baseline at four facilities in the coming months while a joint committee will work to find more recruiting sites throughout the U.S. Forbes reports that filling all 10,000 spots is expected to take four years, while Verily’s researchers intend to monitor participants for at least another four.

Each volunteer’s journey will start with a battery of tests designed to paint a comprehensive picture of their medical condition. The checklist includes a CAT scan, eye exams and blood tests among others. Once they’ve completed the initial stage, participants will be asked to return for follow-up every year. To cover the period in between, Verily will send them home with several gadgets designed to track their key health signs.

The most notable item is the Verily Study Watch, an unobtrusive wearable designed like an old-fashioned timepiece that can passively track the electrocardiogram, heart rate, electrodermal activity and movement patterns of the user. It will be joined by a sleep sensor that volunteers will have to place under their mattress and an app for manually reporting physical conditions.

Adrian Hernandez, one of the Duke medical professors taking part in the project, told CNBC that he expects at least five years to pass before the initiative starts yielding useful information. The scope and duration of the study means that it will probably be quite costly, but this shouldn’t be too big a concern for Verily.

Besides Alphabet’s support, the group also has a $800 million cash trove at its disposal that was provided by a state-own Singaporean fund earlier this year. Project Baseline is one of several long-term medical initiative that Verily is financing with the help of its deep-pocketed backers. Among its more ambitious projects is an effort to rear swarms of genetically modified mosquitoes engineered to eliminate members of their species that carry disease.

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