A decade is an important milestone in technology – and Huawei has spent 10 years at the heart of the wearables industry.
Huawei will use its wearable product event on 14 September to mark the launch of its new fashion-forward strategy, with all-new Huawei wearable devices that continue to embrace health, fitness, and connected technologies.
10 years of wearables
Huawei
It started back in 2014 with the Huawei Talkband B1, taking a familiar fitness band form factor that married health and fitness features with a removable Bluetooth headset so you could spend less time reaching for your smartphone.
Next came the Huawei Watch, a smartwatch that showed that owning a connected timepiece didn’t mean making compromises on wearing a watch that felt and looked like a watch.
The Huawei Watch 2 arrived two years later with another first, as it introduced eSIM technology to make it a smartwatch that could truly stand alone.
In recent years, Huawei has broken new ground bringing medical-grade heart rate monitoring and the ability to measure blood pressure without calibration with the arrival of the Huawei Watch D.
Huge global influence
Huawei
Now Huawei’s wearable presence is represented by smartwatches, sports watches, fitness tracker bands, and kids' watches.
Over 130 million Huawei wearables have shipped globally with over 450 million users registered to its Huawei Health app, and over 100 million actively logging into the companion app on their phones. So the Huawei wearables ecosystem has enormous reach and exerts global influence.
Huawei is not standing still as it continues on this journey to redefine what wearables are capable of, displacing the devices we’ve come to rely on for longer than that decade. Huawei has sought to bring positive change in the space.
Huawei's Full Stack provides the foundations for the OS, sensors, algorithms, and services that power those detailed sleep, fitness, and health insights.
At the heart of that innovation lies the Huawei Health Kit and Huawei Research Kit, which open the door to third-party apps to build a strong health and fitness ecosystem.
That innovation can also be seen through Huawei's advanced sensors and algorithms, which enable its wearables to offer groundbreaking insights about what exactly is going on in our bodies.
In 2016, the Huawei TruSeen™ vital detection technology could monitor resting heart rate. But in just two years, it was able to screen for Arrhythmia, showcasing the ability to venture into the world of serious health monitoring.
The TruSeen™ detection technology can now collect ECG measurements, continuously track SpO2 levels, as well as support blood pressure monitoring.
And the forthcoming TruSeen™ 5.5+ update will handle complex and dynamic environments and fitness conditions.
Transforming your workouts
Huawei has also dedicated time to making its wearables more powerful in the realm of not only how it can track your exercise time, but also taking those workout metrics and analyzing them to better understand what you should do next.
Its Huawei TruSport™ solution embraces sensors that have been commonplace in wearables for a long time including GPS, barometer, and temperature sensors.
Those sensors and algorithms work together to advise if you’re training to an optimal level and recommend workouts, if you don’t know where or how to start your fitness journey.
Huawei harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to build training and fitness plans that are tailored for every user.
Powerful health monitors
Huawei
For many, a wearable represents something that will keep you accountable for the steps you make and also the sleep you get each night and the evolution of Huawei TruSleep™ showcases just how much can be drawn from that slumber time.
Huawei has harnessed them to go beyond monitoring the basics of when you’ve woken up or fallen asleep, to how much important REM sleep time you’ve secured.
There’s now a sleep score to quickly understand how good or bad your sleep has been, and offer tips to upgrade that sleep time.
It screens for sleep apnea, which could lead to serious health issues – and this is just the start of what Huawei can screen for during sleep.
Wearables are now being looked at as ways of monitoring health in a truly valuable way.
That’s marked by the way Huawei's Tru platform can delve deeper into areas of interest like heart health, offering insights into vascular age through its sensors and algorithms.
Huawei continues to be a leader in bringing blood pressure monitoring to the wrist, to make detecting hypertension just the start of what its wearables can offer.
The next 10 years
Huawei
So that was the first ten years, so what of the next decade?
Huawei is on the cusp of announcing its latest wearable device in Barcelona on September 14th.
This will mark Huawei's new ‘Fashion Forward’ wearable strategy, which will drive the next 10 years of innovation.
And Huawei's wearables will evolve to be smarter and more useful in day-to-day life.
Studies conducted in 2023 have already explored how Huawei watches can be used to monitor blood sugar, a type of health monitoring that is often dubbed the ‘Holy Grail’ of wearable monitoring.
Research that Huawei has conducted through its wearable innovations has been recognized by the medical community to support the work it is doing to better wearables and what they’re capable of.
Accuracy is at the heart of this and Huawei has already sought to create the right environments to ensure that it can build and test accurate wearables, whether it’s for health or fitness purposes.
Since 2016, it’s built three test labs, with a further lab under construction in Europe to take testing further afield and help get innovations onto the wrist quicker.
Huawei shows no signs of slowing up in its pursuit to make wearables more wearable. To provide them with the sensors and smarts that will redefine what a wearable should and can be capable of.
Whether it’s through building on its research and health tracking platforms or breathing new life into wearables sensors that have existed for some time, it’s achieved more than most in ten years, and ten years later the wearable landscape will no doubt be a very different and exciting space thanks to the major part Huawei is playing to innovate for many more years to come.
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