A new level of proactive health and wellness is coming to your wrist. Backed by rigorous clinical research, these new features track subtle physiological shifts and help you catch changes in your health and wellness that need attention.

Florence Thng

Health Intelligence Product Management Director

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This content is generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental

Health Guardian features ¹ — a suite of proactive health and safety tools — are coming soon to the Google Health app for Pixel Watch and Fitbit Air. Health Guardian features include three new capabilities that can track important shifts in your body over time and deliver insights to help you make informed choices about your health.

By working quietly in the background 24/7, Health Guardian features can track usually invisible health and wellness indicators, such as insulin resistance trends. The information is shared in a monthly summary in the Google Health app that highlights noteworthy shifts. You can also get timely notifications if a feature detects something that requires your attention.

Whenever you get new information, Google Health Coach is there to help you understand what it means. ² Your Coach acts as your partner, translating your data into clear insights and guiding you on practical lifestyle changes to improve your health and wellness.

Here are the four Health Guardian features that will be coming soon to qualified Pixel Watches and Fitbit Air. ³

1. Insulin resistance trends: Insulin resistance affects how efficiently your body absorbs energy from food. When your insulin resistance is trending high, your body works overtime to deliver that energy. Prolonged unmanaged insulin resistance can lead to a deterioration of your metabolic health. And because these shifts happen quietly, roughly 40% of adults are unaware they’re happening. If you catch fluctuations in your insulin resistance early, you have the opportunity to improve your metabolic health by changing your nutrition, sleep, and movement. A first-of-its-kind feature on Pixel and Fitbit wearables, Insulin Resistance Trends analyzes multi-week physiological data to track shifts in your metabolic health without requiring a single drop of blood. ⁴
2. Blood pressure trends: Blood pressure is one of the most important indicators of heart health, but for most people it’s invisible. Six in 10 people ⁵ don’t realize when their blood pressure has shifted higher. These persistent patterns over time can lead to a deterioration in your heart and kidney health. ⁶ Our devices passively measure your pulse and motion patterns throughout the month to estimate your blood pressure trends without requiring a cuff or manual calibration. This helps you spot persistent higher cardiovascular trends early so you can make lifestyle changes, confirm patterns with a home blood pressure monitor, or consult a healthcare professional. ⁷
3. Sleep breathing quality trends: Breathing variations can interrupt your sleep without fully waking you and impact your energy and recovery. sleep breathing quality trends give you a new way of understanding how your breathing changes while you sleep. Each morning, you'll see how much of your sleep was spent in optimal breathing. Those insights come together into a monthly assessment that can help you recognize longer-term patterns, adjust your sleep environment and daily habits, or talk with a healthcare professional about how to increase your daytime energy.
4. Breathing emergency detection: [Pixel Watch; select European countries only] When a breathing-related emergency — severe pneumonia, an accidental drug overdose, or choking — causes a persistent, critical drop in oxygen saturation, a person can rapidly become unresponsive and unable to call for help. ⁸ A first of its kind, opt-in feature on Pixel Watch, breathing emergency detection can recognize when a person’s blood oxygen level drops dangerously low. If they become unresponsive, it can automatically call emergency services and, if applicable, their emergency contacts so they can receive potentially life-saving care. ^{9 10}

Bringing this technology to your wrist is the result of years of breakthrough AI research. Traditionally, teaching AI required experts to manually analyze and label thousands of hours of sensor data. Instead, we developed advanced AI models that taught themselves human biology by observing sensor data from millions of opted-in users across billions of minutes of everyday life.

The result is a state of the art sensor model that deeply understands how the human body works and can even fill in the blanks when your device misses a beat or captures incomplete data.

Every Health Guardian feature has undergone thoughtful clinical validation with gold-standard ground truth devices and measurement protocol, incorporating feedback from the scientific community. For example:

• Insulin resistance trends are built with our latest large sensor foundational model, which is pretrained on over one trillion minutes of data from 5 million opted-in users. An article speaking to their accuracy, which was validated by standard clinical blood tests, was published in Nature.
• Blood pressure trends are built on WavesFM, a foundation model trained on billions of minutes of raw heart and movement data. The data was validated across a diverse range of people and by a Fitbit Hypertension Labs study.

By powering Health Guardian features with advanced AI, we’re laying the foundation for a new wave of health insights. Moving forward, these models and advancement will allow your wearable to catch more subtle changes early, helping you take proactive steps toward a longer, healthier life.

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