Along with the announcement of the Pixel Watch 3 smartwatch, which comes in two sizes, Google is also introducing a new, potentially life-saving feature: Pulse Loss Detection. At its Made by Google 2024 event on Tuesday, the company announced the addition of this particular health emergency-sensing watch feature, along with other new tools and features, like a workout “readiness” score, an aerobic load score, and a personalized daily target load that combines the former and latter metrics to show how much intensity you can tolerate each day.
But the more appealing addition, even for non-athletes, is the loss of pulse detection.
According to Google, loss of pulse is a health issue that can happen to anyone and refers to a state in which the heart “is not beating enough to sustain life.” This can be caused by a variety of health conditions, including cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, circulatory failure, overdose, or poisoning.
The company noted that currently, the infrastructure is in place to get people medical help as quickly as possible, but it's all based on the assumption that someone will call emergency medical services on your behalf. However, many health emergencies happen when you're alone and there's no one around to help you. In fact, more than half of the time, Google said, people are alone when they experience these emergencies.
Now, with this first-of-its-kind feature, when the Pixel Watch 3 detects a loss of pulse emergency, it will call emergency medical services and provide vital information, like the user's location, so they can get medical help right away. (If there's a false positive, a timer on the watch face will count down and allow the user to prevent the call from being made.)
Google explained that the watch doesn't just check the pulse itself, it also looks at other physiological and movement data and combines them via smart AI-driven algorithms on the watch to determine pulse loss events.
“We hope this will be the airbag and smoke detector moment that becomes the standard to keep us safe when life's unexpected events occur,” Google said.
The Missed Pulse feature will be available on the Pixel Watch 3 initially in select EU countries and the UK, with more regions expected to follow.