Garmin watches may have more health and wellness applications than you think. Always popular with athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and adventurers for activity tracking and GPS navigation, medical researchers also appreciate Garmin devices for their battery life, high quality sensor data, and ability to transfer data between partners. Garmin Connect Health Solutions provides APIs and SDKs for partners with emphasis on privacy and ease of use. At CES 2023 Garmin representatives stressed the platform’s role in research studies, citing an impressive milestone for Garmin’s connected devices and a new resource for future research.
The Garmin Health Research Solutions is an online resource for researchers seeking biosensor data. The platform currently includes more than 500 research projects and third-party medical studies that employed Garmin wearables to monitor biometric data. The 500-study milestone is an impressive start for launching the research resource. Medical researchers are invited to explore ways to use Garmin wearables in their work.
One of many examples of healthcare platforms incorporating Garmin wearables, Twin Health developed a service that works with a Garmin fitness tracker to help patients with diabetes manage the disease. Twin Health uses Garmin Vivosmart 4 wearables to support pre-diabetic and Type 2 diabetic patients. The program includes the Garmin smartwatch and a noninvasive continuous glucose monitor; these work in concert with the Twin Health mobile app. The app tracks blood sugar levels and other metabolic data continuously. Twin Health reported a randomized controlled trial of the service in which 92% of the participants were able to stop taking insulin and all other medications. I have not seen the study, but 92% improvement appears to be an optimistically high improvement rate. The larger story, however, is Garmin’s increasing role in monitoring biometric data and the Garmin Health Research Solutions debut.
