‘Google Pixel Watch Services’ released on Play Store

Abner Li | Oct 7 2022 - 12:01 am PT

Google has various “services” apps on the Play Store, and the latest today supports the Pixel Watch’s health capabilities.

The Play Store description, with a generic settings gear app icon, for Google Pixel Watch Services says it “provides your watch with improved algorithms for sensor processing.” This approach means full system updates are not needed to deliver improvements, with 1.0.9139874 the current version.

The package name is com.google.android.wearable.fitbit.mcu.data, with Fitbit’s James Park on Thursday noting how the “Pixel Watch uses a combination of on-device machine learning and deep optimization, down to the processor level, to give you an accurate measurement of your heart rate continuously at once per second.” As a reminder, that’s the Exynos 9110 SoC and a Cortex M33 co-processor.

Fitbit and Google’s machine learning teams worked on this, with the former claiming this is its “most accurate heart rate tracking yet.” In marketing, that one-second internal is being equated to “track[ing] heart rate like time.”

The creation process involved taking thousands of hours of training data and applying machine learning to “pull all the common patterns both in everyday life during their everyday exercises, learn to reject the noise, and in the end generate an accurate heart rate.”

Meanwhile, the Pixel Watch will get Fall Detection in 2023 and can alert emergency services as necessary.