Garmin smartwatches will now be able to offer users a deeper insight into their heart health, after the company integrated its wearables with the Cardiogram app.
The app will run on all Garmin smartwatches that offer heart rate monitor, such as the Fenix 5 Plus, Forerunner 935 and Vivoactive 3 Music, using the built-in sensor to provide better insights into user’s activity and sleep.
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The app will be able to detect serious health conditions as well. In multiple clinical studies with more than 14,011 participants Cardiogram has validated accuracy of its DeepHeart algorithm in detecting four medical conditions: atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea, hypertension and diabetes.
Apple Watch and Wear OS watches already offer these services through Cardiogram.
“Many users have asked Cardiogram to support Garmin wearables. By directly integrating through the Garmin Health API, Cardiogram has access to the wide array of advanced metrics these devices generate,” Johnson Hsieh, cofounder of Cardiogram, said in a statement. “Garmin devices are great because they give us high-resolution, accurate data and the higher resolution, the more accurate DeepHeart can become.”
Cardiogram’s artificial intelligence-based algorithm, DeepHeart technology uses a deep neural network and machine learning to predict heart disease. The company got its start by integrating with Apple Watches and has since gone through a slew of validation studies, reports MobiHealthNews.
“There’s a surprising amount of signal in the humble heart rate sensor. In a sequence of studies with UC San Francisco’s Cardiology department, Cardiogram has shown that optical heart rate sensors, when combined with a deep neural network, can accurately detect multiple major health conditions including diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, and atrial fibrillation,” Brandon Ballinger, cofounder of Cardiogram, wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “As part of the launch, Garmin owners may opt-in to join Cardiogram’s research study with UCSF Cardiology. By using the high-resolution, accurate heart rate data from Garmin devices, Cardiogram can make its algorithm more accurate, potentially saving lives using ordinary consumer wearables.”
The Garmin-integrated app is compatible with Android and iPhones. A blog post by Cardiogram notes that the iPhone only updates once a day but the company is working on making it sync more often.
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“In the long term, we think wearables will save lives. People love to engage with their heart rate data day-to-day. The average user opens Cardiogram three times per day,” Hsieh said in a statement. “Your heart rate changes from minute-to-minute, and it reflects everything that happens in your life.”
About Cardiogram
Cardiogram transforms ordinary consumer wearables with heart rate sensors into a personal healthcare companion. The San Francisco, CA-based company’s mission is to broadly implement preventive medicine in a way that measurably helps people stay healthy or get healthier. They aim to reduce undiagnosis rates among prevalent conditions, lower the likelihood of a condition from getting worse, and ultimately improve population health.
