These days, smartwatches are expected to let you know greater than just the time or your step count, so an increasing number of tech firms have turned to health, tracking things like sleep patterns and heart rate as the following big thing.
To this end, San Diego-based Qualcomm has entered right into a latest partnership with medical technology company Masimo and Google to bring these latest tools to your wrist.
The firms are working together to expand the features of the following generation of smartwatches, similar to health and wellness tracking tools. The internal technology will profit manufacturers that make smartwatches running Google's operating system.
Although Qualcomm is best known for its chips and modems utilized in smartphones and laptops, the San Diego-based company has also applied its expertise to quite a few other areas, similar to cars and virtual reality headsets.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon technology is already utilized in quite a few wearable devices, including high-end designer smartwatches, a smartwatch with a medical alert for seniors, FitBits, power-saving smartwatches for youngsters and GPS trackers for pet collars.
“Starting with Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1, this collaboration will significantly expand the choice of smartwatches for consumers and further enhance the already exceptional Wear OS experience,” said Dino Bekis, vice chairman of wearables and mixed-signal solutions at Qualcomm. “With these reference designs, (manufacturers) will benefit from robust, production-ready designs that integrate Masimo's cutting-edge biosensing technology and Qualcomm Technologies' leading Snapdragon wearable platforms. This will ultimately enable them to bring their smartwatches to market seamlessly and quickly at scale.”
Joe Kiani, founder and CEO of Masimo, said it was a natural selection for the corporate to make use of Qualcomm's chips for its latest smartwatch technology, called Masimo Freedom. The upcoming watch – which just isn’t approved for medical use – monitors vitals similar to relative hydration, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate and pulse.
“In short, Qualcomm Technologies and Masimo engineers are working together to optimize the 'inside' of the smartwatch,” Kiani said within the announcement. “Masimo's ability to develop precise monitoring technologies and advanced signal processing algorithms, combined with carefully designed, high-performance and low-power Snapdragon systems, is a compelling foundation.”
Irvine-based Masimo makes health-focused technologies for hospitals, similar to pulse oximeters, in addition to consumer devices similar to watches and baby monitors that monitor vital signs.
Masimo made headlines when it sued Apple in 2020 for infringing its patents on wearable technology that monitors blood oxygen and heart rate. In December, a court ruled that the blood oxygen monitoring in Apple Watches actually infringed Masimo's patent, prompting the tech giant to remove the feature from its product.
News of Masimo's partnership with Qualcomm comes per week after Apple unveiled its upcoming iPhone and smartwatch models. One of the important thing features the corporate highlighted on its Apple Watch Series 10 is sleep apnea notifications that track the user's respiratory patterns.
Originally published:
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