Garmin joins up with Cardiogram to bring advanced heart data to its wearables

Garmin watches will now be able to offer more advanced heart rate metrics, after the company integrated its devices with the Cardiogram app.

Running on all Garmin wearables with an optical heart rate monitor, such as the Fenix 5 Plus, Forerunner 935 and Vivoactive 3 Music, the heart rate specialists will now be able to leverage the built-in sensor to provide better insights into user's activity and sleep.

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And these insights include the detection of serious health conditions. Through multiple studies, Cardiogram's DeepHeart algorithm has gained recognition after being found to accurately identify four medical conditions - atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea, hypertension and diabetes - with these smarts already available through the Apple Watch and Wear OS watches.

But the difference between this integration and ones that have come before, according to Cardiogram, is that recent Garmin watches offer some of the most accurate, high-resolution readings in the wearables market, which in turn leads to more detailed heart rate graphs, and, from there, a more accurate disease detection algorithm.

As you might expect, the app is available to those with an Android or iOS device, though Cardiogram does indicate that the latter currently only lets users sync their data once per day. The company says it's working on improving this, and to keep a look out for future updates.

Other than that, this is another sign that wearable giants are serious about maximising the potential of the sensors already packed inside their devices. We expect the likes of Apple and Garmin to eventually work out their own algorithms for wider health monitoring, but this is the perfect stop-gap for users until proprietary methods become the norm.