Google research scientist with UW ties designs ‘Loss of Pulse Detection’ feature for smartwatch

In a race against time, a smartwatch might be the best defense.

More specifically, the time concern is the loss of pulse brought on by cardiac arrest. And the defense could be a Pixel Watch 3 with technology developed at Google by Jake Sunshine, a research scientist at the company who is also an associate professor at the University of Washington.

Google’s “Loss of Pulse Detection” received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration at the end of February and will begin rolling out in the U.S. at the end of this month.

The feature, detailed in the journal Nature last month, relies on optical heart-rate sensors on the back of the watch to detect when someone experiences loss of pulse when their heart stops beating. The tech makes a call to emergency services, saving critical time for potentially life-saving care.

Sunshine previously co-founded Sound Life Sciences, a small UW health tech spinout that developed an app to monitor breathing. The company was acquired by Google in 2022.

An anesthesiologist by training, Sunshine said he’s spent a lot of time in operating rooms and ICUs taking care of people, and he’s witnessed dated technologies designed to keep people alive during very vulnerable health moments.

“If you deconstruct what’s in those machines and what’s in our pockets, or on our wrists, with some of these smart devices, they’re just far more sophisticated than equipment that we use in the hospital,” he said.

Sunshine’s hope has been to leverage these technologies and their sensing capabilities to try to tackle some big public health problems at an impressive scale.

He called cardiac arrest, particularly in unwitnessed circumstances, our biggest time-sensitive emergency. Chances of survival can decrease by 10% for every one minute someone goes without resuscitation, so the sooner a person can get help, the better their chances are of having a favorable outcome, he said.

Google’s Pixel Watch has previously featured safety and health features such as Car Crash Detection, Fall Detection, Irregular Heart Rhythm Notifications and the ECG app and Safety Check.

Sunshine said there is a great deal of consideration that goes into any tech that monitors a potentially life threatening condition alongside any algorithm that is subsequently tied into a 911 system. He said a ton of effort and thought went into minimizing the chances of false emergency calls.

Loss of Pulse Detection makes its assessment within one minute, which leads to a countdown timer of about 20 seconds before the emergency transmission. The feature relays an automated message to 911 about the lack of pulse and where the person is located.

The opt-in feature on Pixel Watch 3 was first made available in the European Union and is now in 14 countries.