The clock is Google’s ticking is on. The company has been trying to regain ground in the wearable computing space since it acquired Fitbit and resurrected Wear OS, the operating system that powers smartwatches from several companies including Google, Samsung and OnePlus.
The platform debuted as Android Wear in 2014, and now, a decade later, it’s finally coming of age. In an interview with WIRED, Sandeep Waraich, director of product management for Google Wearables, says that Wear OS saw a 40 percent surge in growth by 2023, and that there are now “millions” of Pixel Watches on customers’ wrists two years after the original Pixel Watch debuted.
It would be hard to discern that maturity and growth if you were only looking at sales figures for the Pixel Watch, which is still a drop in market share compared to industry veterans like Garmin, Apple, and Samsung. However, with the new Pixel 3 watchGoogle’s third-generation smartwatch, announced today at an event in Mountain View, California, pioneers a new health feature for wearables: pulse loss detection. The feature is triggered when the watch’s sensor detects specific abnormalities in your blood flow, at which point the watch sends an alert to see if you’re okay and calls for help if you’re not. This technology is only available in Europe at launch, but Google says it’s working with regulators to bring it to the U.S.
“The profound nature of saving someone’s life through a feature film is a huge responsibility that we felt the need to take on; the ambition was quite big when we started doing it,” says Waraich.
More than 300,000 people die each year in the United States from cardiac arrest, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood InstituteImmediate treatment during such an event is crucial and is the only way to prevent loss of life. Comilla Sasson, vice president of emergency cardiovascular care at the American Heart Association, writes in an email statement to WIRED that detecting a loss of pulse could be an important step toward intervention.
“We know that witnessed arrests have better outcomes, and if we could activate the emergency response earlier for unwitnessed events, this could dramatically change survival,” says Sasson.
If you take the Pixel Watch 3 off your wrist, it doesn’t think you’re going into cardiac arrest. Waraich says there are complicated algorithms at play. It analyzes data from the photoplethysmography sensor (the PPG sensor uses infrared light to track blood circulation under the skin) and looks for purposeful movement during the pulse loss event. Google worked with doctors to see how it manifests in the body with physiological signals with “very high accuracy.” Waraich says it’s not perfect, and that’s why there are redundancies to avoid false positives: The watch will ask the user to check in by tapping the screen, and if there’s no response, it will have an audio cue so bystanders can intervene, and it will place a call to emergency services indicating that the user is experiencing a pulse loss event.
Power play
The driving force behind this technology is Google’s focus on accurate heart rate tracking since the original Pixel Watch, but it’s also the combination of the company’s machine learning teams with the deep expertise of Fitbit’s engineers. (Google acquired the wearables maker in 2019.) Power and performance also play a big role, since heart rate tracking is continuous, not just when you’re working out. And that’s the area the company sees as the biggest challenge: powering these rich feature sets — many of which require on-device machine learning algorithms — with battery life that doesn’t force you to turn off features just to survive a day.
“We think it’s really important that a wearable can be relied upon to get you through your worst day, and that needs to be true for users with the smallest watches that fit on smaller wrists, which limits battery size,” says Bjorn Kilburn, Google’s general manager for Wear OS. “There’s no way around solving this by just putting a really big battery in it.” That said, the new Pixel Watch 3 does It comes in two sizes for the first time, with the 45mm model housing a battery that’s 35 percent larger than the 41mm model.
