The clock is ticking for Google. The company has largely been playing catch-up in the wearable-computing space ever since its acquisition of Fitbit and revival of Wear OS, the operating system that powers smartwatches from various companies, including Google, Samsung, and OnePlus.
The platform debuted as Android Wear in 2014, and now, a decade later, it's finally maturing. In an interview with WIRED, Sandeep Waraich, product management lead for Google Wearables, says Wear OS saw a 40 percent growth spurt in 2023, and there are now “millions†of Pixel Watch on customers’ wrists two years after the original Pixel Watch debuted.
That maturity and growth would be hard to discern if you just looked at the Pixel Watch's sales numbers, which is still a drop in the market share bucket compared to industry veterans like Garmin, Apple, and Samsung. However, with the new Pixel Watch 3, announced today at an event in Mountain View, California, Google’s third-generation smartwatch is pioneering a new health feature for wearables: Loss of Pulse Detection. The feature kicks in when the watch’s sensor detects specific anomalies in your blood flow, at which point the watch sends an alert to see whether you're OK and calls for help if you're not. This technology is available only in Europe at launch, but Google says it is working with regulators to bring it to the US.
“The profound nature of saving someone's life through a feature—that is a big responsibility that we felt the urge to take on; the ambition was pretty big when we started on it,†Waraich says.
More than 300,000 people die every year in the US from cardiac arrest, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Immediate 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 for the American Heart Association, writes in an email statement to WIRED that detecting a loss of pulse could be a major step for intervention.
“We know witnessed arrest has better outcomes, and if we could activate emergency response sooner for the unwitnessed events, this could dramatically change survival,†Sasson says.
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 looks at data from the photoplethysmography sensor (the PPG sensor uses infrared light to track blood circulation below the skin), and it searches for purposeful motion during the loss of pulse event. Google worked with clinicians to see how it manifests in the body with physiological signals to a “very high accuracy.†Waraich says it's not perfect, and that's why there are redundancies to prevent 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 signal so that bystanders can potentially intervene, and it will place a call to emergency services indicating that the user is experience a loss of pulse 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 wearable maker in 2019.) Power and performance have a big part to play as well, since the 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 disable features just to make it through a day.
“We think it's super critical that a wearable can be trusted to get through your worst day, and that needs to be true for users with the smallest watches that fit on the smallest wrists, which constrains the size of the battery," says Bjorn Kilburn, Google's general manager for Wear OS. "There's no getting out of solving this by just putting a really big battery in it.†That said, the new Pixel Watch 3 does come in two sizes for the first time, with the 45-mm model stuffing a battery that's 35 percent larger than the one in the 41-mm model.
This is especially true as the Pixel Watch 3 powers more multi-device interactions than ever. You can use the Wear OS Google Home app now to look at your Nest security camera feeds and talk to the person standing outside your front door. You can even use the watch as a remote for Google TV.
But Google has been taking steps to improve battery life. One part of this is aided by an acquisition of Finnish company KoruLab in 2022, which makes battery optimization tech. The acquisition has now been completed, and Kilburn says the results are enabled in third-party smartwatches like Samsung's Galaxy Watch7. KoruLab's expertise is in low-power graphical displays, which on these smartwatches can deliver a rich visual experience while sipping power, which is especially handy on things you see frequently on the watch. That includes watch faces with live complications.
Google and many other watch-makers use a hybrid architecture approach, where a high-performance processor handles intense tasks and requests while a low-power chip manages continuous tasks like heart rate monitoring or Always-on Display. This year in the Pixel Watch 3, the company says even more tasks have been shifted to this low-power processor to conserve battery.
Yet with these advancements, Google is still being conservative with its battery life claims, touting the same “24-hour†battery life as the original model. However, the Pixel Watch's Battery Saver mode now extends that to 36 hours, and Waraich was adamant that you don't have to worry about it cutting off health tracking features when you're conserving power. “It shouldn't be giving you any anxiety. ‘Should I turn off the display? Am I using LTE?’ That anxiety around battery is our north star, as in you should not be thinking about that,†he says.
Future Enhancements
One area the Pixel Watch 3 doesn't measure up to its peers is in repairability, and Google didn't have much to share on this front. Certain components of the Apple Watch and Samsung's Galaxy Watches are repairable through a licensed technician, but if something happens to your Pixel Watch, Google will just replace it rather than repair it. Waraich says the watch will get three years of feature updates, but the team is continuing to “look at opportunities†to make it repairable.
That length of software support feels contradictory to the seven years of support Google now offers to its Pixel smartphones. A part of this is likely due to battery longevity—the power cells lose their potency over time. But the other is the length of time chipsets are supported, and the Pixel Watch 3's uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear W5 Gen 1 (the same as last year) rather than Google's custom silicon. Even the latest Google Pixel Buds Pro 2 is powered by Google's new Tensor A1 chipset, but it doesn't seem like we can expect a custom Tensor processor in a Pixel Watch anytime soon.
“The reason why we built [Tensor A1] is because off-the-shelf components didn't work out for us,†Waraich says. “In the case of watches, a lot of the hybrid architecture already utilizes how we work with chipset partners. We feel that our ecosystem is pretty healthy from a chipset standpoint to bring the experiences we need, so for now we have decided to partner there and not invest in our own silicon.â€
Speaking of investing, you might be surprised to hear that Google still has two fitness apps: Fitbit, which is exclusive to Pixel Watches and some Fitbits, and Google Fit. The latter was the default fitness and health tracking app for Wear OS until the first Pixel Watch's launch. It's still available and an app you can install on any Wear OS watch, and while Google hasn't made any notable updates to the service, Kilburn says it's still supported and “providing choice to our users.â€
What About a Ring?
Will you ever get a choice between a Pixel Watch and perhaps a Pixel Ring? With significant attention on the smart ring space ever since Oura, and now Samsung, entered the fray, I asked if we can expect Google to hop on the bandwagon, and the short answer is no.
Waraich says there are a set of users that want rich, premium experiences on the wrist, but there's another set of people who want discrete, simple fitness and health tracking with long battery life—and that's where Google's Fitbit trackers come in, like the Charge 6. “We feel that with Pixel Watch and our tracker portfolio, we have a pretty robust way to address those needs.â€
The Pixel Watch 3 is available for preorder now starting at $349 and goes on sale September 10.
Correction on August 15, 2024: Google initially told us the tech from KoruLabs is available in the Pixel Watch 3, but the company now says it's only in a few third-party devices. We've updated the story to reflect this.
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