Google’s Pixel Watch, the first smartwatch from the company, has a special feature called fall detection. When a user has a heavy fall, the watch asks if the user needs medical assistance and automatically makes an emergency call, and Google detailed the work behind how it developed this feature in its Keyword blog.
Google’s product lead, Paras Unadkat, said that understanding what constitutes a “hard fall” requires collecting a lot of data and training artificial intelligence models to distinguish between different types of movement patterns. To do this, Google sought help from universities and labs that were already studying the phenomenon of falls, and built devices to simulate falls and observe people’s reactions when they lose their balance and used computer vision to try to visualize different types of falls.
In addition, Google took into account physics, such as the different limb lengths and body sizes of humans. To better train the sensors inside the watch, Google also brought in stuntmen to actually fall to the ground. There are many tiny sensors inside the watch that not only sense the user’s movement but also monitor their heart rate, steps and sleep, and these sensors recognize the typical reactions of the human body in the event of a hard fall.
Google said that during the development process, a lot of testing was also conducted to ensure that the watch would not misjudge the user’s daily activities as emergencies. For example, jumping, swimming and doing push-ups and other high-intensity activities, the watch was able to remain “calm” and identify these as routine movements.
The last step is to allow users to get help quickly. Google says it has been testing its fall detection feature for more than a year, involving hundreds of people, before officially releasing the Pixel Watch. Google also worked with the emergency community to test the quality of calls when the watch automatically dials to ensure that the voice is clear and well-informed.
The Pixel Watch launched last fall and only gained fall detection in late February. After a hard fall, the watch displays two options: “I’m hurt & need help” and “I’m okay. If the user has the Wi-Fi version of the watch, they will need to be in range of their phone’s Bluetooth connection to contact emergency services.
In addition to fall detection, the Pixel Watch also adds other health and safety features in the latest June 2023 update, including enabling the SpO2 sensor to monitor the user’s blood oxygen levels.
