Google's Pixel Watch is getting a life-saving feature that Apple Watch doesn't have

The Pixel Watch 3 is getting a first-of-its-kind, potentially life-saving feature.

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In a blog post, Google announced that it had received FDA clearance for its Loss of Pulse Detection feature.

Tracking your heartbeat

The feature works by tracking your heartbeat. If your heart stops beating — due to cardiac arrest, respiratory or circulatory failure, overdose, or poisoning — your watch will automatically turn on more accurate infrared LEDs and look for motion data.

If the watch determines you’re not responsive, it will start a countdown and audio alarm. If you still don’t respond, the watch will place a call to emergency services using your LTE or phone connection, inform them that you don’t have a pulse, and share your location.

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Google says the watch will be able to tell the difference between an actual cardiac event and the user simply removing the watch.

Safety features like fall detection and crash detection aren’t new, but they aren’t at the level of this one (which is why it needed FDA clearance first). Other watches have heartbeat tracking, but they track much less frequently than the Pixel 3. The Apple Watch, for example, tracks heart rate every 3 to 7 minutes by default.

Google worked with cardiologists

Speaking to The Verge in August, Sandeep Waraich, senior director of product management for Pixel wearables, explained that pulse detection is a combination of pulse, heartbeat, contact with skin, and “a bunch of other things like motion.”

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To develop the feature, Google worked with cardiologists to learn what a loss of pulse looks like on watch insights. That data was used to build an AI algorithm that was then tested using hundreds of thousands of hours of real-life user data from a diverse group of people. Google then used stunt actors wearing tourniquets that would artificially create a lack of pulse and simulated the types of falls that would mimic a person suddenly losing their pulse.

Release timeline

Pulse detection should be available in the US by the end of March and will arrive via an update.