Google Health Guardian

Google is adding four background health features to specific Pixel Watch 3, 4 or 5 and Fitbit Air models under ‘Health Guardian’, and as you would expect, each one comes with a footnote of disclaimers.

Amrit Bance

5 min read

Google Health Guardian

Four Features

Is it ‘Trendy’?

Health Guardian tracks insulin resistance, blood pressure trends, sleep breathing quality trends, and breathing emergency detection. Notice the use of the word ‘trends’ here? Interesting. To produce these insulin resistance trends, the model has been trained on data from 5 million opted-in users and then checked against blood tests.

Cuff-Free Blood Pressure Monitoring

It passively measures pulse and motion patterns throughout the month to estimate blood pressure. It doesn't require a cuff or manual calibration. Blood pressure trends are built on WavesFM, which has been trained on billions of minutes of data. From what we can see, it spots trends over the course of a month, so it cannot be used to provide real-time blood pressure readings.

The Nightly Breathing Report

Sleep tracking interests us the most, as it tracks how your breathing changes while you sleep, which then builds up to a monthly assessment of how much of your sleep was spent ‘optimally’ breathing. Speaking of breathing, if you opt-in, Health Guardian on the Pixel Watch will detect when a person’s blood oxygen level drops dangerously low, and can automatically call emergency services (if it's available). Although, it won't catch every emergency, since it only monitors the first 30 minutes of sleep. It's currently only available in select European countries.

What It Won’t Tell You

The usual disclaimer remains: it is not intended to diagnose, mitigate, treat or cure any disease. Neither is it a prescreener for hypertension or diabetes, nor is it intended to monitor glucose levels in real time. It shouldn’t be used as a replacement for a blood pressure monitor. If you want help understanding the information you will need Google Health Coach, which is behind a subscription (£7.99 or $9.99 per month).

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