Today, health has become a common concern for everyone. Among them, wearable devices, with their meticulous companionship, have begun to influence and change people's lives!
Nobel Prize winner in physics George Smoot once participated in such a project: focusing on the clinical application of wearable devices and artificial intelligence technology, using smart wearable devices to automatically warn of acute myocardial infarction. It can save lives to the greatest extent possible.
He believes that if wearable devices are combined with artificial intelligence, people can have a better understanding of their bodies and truly achieve early diagnosis and treatment of diseases. They can even use "wearable device artificial intelligence" "The popularization of it will add another 10 years to human life."
Dreams illuminate reality. Today, technology and intelligence are advancing by leaps and bounds. Wearable devices of various forms are emerging one after another. A new wave of wearable devices is emerging in domestic and foreign markets. This trend is taking over the increasingly saturated sales of smartphones, ushering in a new round of "technology changes life".
Currently, smart wearable devices on the market can be used to track and analyze personal heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen and other sports health data, helping people complete health monitoring and heart-related disease early warning without leaving home. and other functions.
According to Huami Technology, it is much more than that. More importantly, Huami believes that health is the core value of the smart wearable industry, and it is even the core value of the entire IoT smart hardware industry.
To provide the best products with excellent functions, ultimate experience, and smooth use, it is far from enough to use universal chips and magically modified systems. In other words, magic modification is a simple and crude way of cutting your feet to fit the shoes, while self-research is tailor-made that requires a lot of investment. Only in this way can we make the ultimate product that meets the needs of users.
Is this enough? "Not satisfied" Huami is still seeking change! Based on the health functions of previous Huami products, the PumpBeats blood pressure monitoring engine, which was developed after 5 years, fully demonstrates Huami’s technological ability to tackle key problems. The engine has completed the first phase of experiments, and wearable devices equipped with the engine can measure blood pressure with one click in 30 seconds.
In addition, Huami envisions "making nuclear magnetic equipment available to millions of households just like PCs did back then" and promotes the research and development of global portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology through investment. Being "small" and agile has always been Huami's specialty. The portable MRI equipment, which is only 1.5 meters tall and weighs less than 0.8 tons, maintains the same lightness characteristics as wearable devices.
Behind all the efforts, Huami continues to convey the concept of "connecting health with technology", constantly enriches and promotes the "core-device-cloud" strategy, and conveys its thinking on the future of the health industry.
The changes in people’s health and life have just begun!
“Core” track, “small” system
In George Smoot’s vision, wearable devices will enter every aspect of life in the future and can even be printed directly on the skin. superior. As long as you are willing and accepting, we can carry out comprehensive health management for you.
The latest data from IDC shows that global smart wearable devices have broad prospects. From 2016 to 2020, the compound growth rate of total wearable device shipments was 44.5. In the next five years, the compound growth rate of global smart wearable device shipments will be approximately 25, and shipments are expected to be 1.358 billion units in 2025, maintaining a strong growth trend.
This is a blue ocean of technology and intelligence, and a hot land full of imagination. All kinds of companies are coming one after another, noisy and lively! However, taking a closer look at the products on the market, many smart wearable devices use universal chips and modified systems, which cannot meet the needs of users and also limit the outside world's imagination of smart wearable devices.
Huang Wang, founder, chairman and CEO of Huami Technology, has a deep understanding of this.
He found that to achieve the ultimate user experience of a smart watch or smart bracelet, it is necessary to find the right chip and the right operating system in the market, and integrate the two into a small space to make what users want. Those functions are almost impossible to complete.
It’s not that I haven’t thought about shortcuts, but shortcuts are not Huami’s way, because Huang Wang refuses to compromise on product experience. Huang Wang said that the ultimate of hardware is the chip, the ultimate of software is the operating system, and the ultimate of the algorithm is the complete set of artificial intelligence algorithms. When the three aspects of technology are developed to the extreme, the final product will be the ultimate product.
Therefore, there are thousands of ways, but Huami only has this one of self-research. Only through self-research can we meet user needs and complete products with the best performance, lowest cost, and best experience.
"Those who are serious about hardware must make software themselves", "Those who are serious about big data must make sensors themselves", "If you want to make perfect algorithms, you must make chips. Otherwise, you will not be able to find a chip in the industry that fully satisfies your algorithm." This is the obsession of Huami and Huang Wang.
Since the first generation of Xiaomi Mi Band was produced in 2014, and now its own brands Amazift and Zepp smart watch shipments rank among the top four in the world, Huami has continuously integrated hardware, software and algorithms to make its products Understand users better and are more suitable for wearable devices.
Obsession can make people stubborn, or it can make people burst out with huge power. Obviously Huami belongs to the latter. In 2018 and 2020, Huami successively released its self-developed wearable device chips-Huangshan 1 and Huangshan 2. At the recent Next Beat 2021 conference, Huami once again released a new generation chip of the same series - Huangshan 2S.
This Huangshan 2S adopts a dual-core RISC-V architecture, which not only integrates GPU and small cores, but also has a world-leading power consumption of small cores. Huangshan 2S has higher computing efficiency and lower power consumption. It is implanted with an NPU using convolutional neural network acceleration technology, which greatly improves the computing performance of local AI data. The recognition speed of atrial fibrillation is faster than that of Huangshan 1 7 times, which is 26 times higher than the pure software algorithm.
Compared with most instruction sets, the RISC-V architecture is open source, has a simple architecture, and is easy to transplant related systems. Three consecutive generations of chips have adopted the RISC-V architecture, and Huami’s vision of building an ecosystem is clear. Corresponding to this idea, at this conference, Huami also released its self-developed smart watch operating system Zepp OS.
Zepp OS is characterized by lightness, low power consumption, and openness. The Zepp OS system package is only 55MB, which is about 1/28 of Apple watch OS. While ensuring the lightness of the system and improving battery life, Zepp OS The system also maintains smooth operation, and the frame rate of most internal interfaces can exceed 60fps.
Low-power self-developed chips and light and flexible "small" systems constitute Huami's "one machine and two wings", which greatly reduces Huami's dependence on other chip manufacturers. At the same time, through self-developed systems To improve competitiveness, Huami has more room for imagination.
And its operating system not only supports Huangshan 2S, but also supports other third-party chip smart watch processors, and even the entire RISC-V ecosystem. "As simple and easy as possible, intelligent interaction can be easily achieved, and it will be natural for others to use it."
“Openness is Huami’s DNA,” Huang Wang said.
Wearable health password
Looking back on the wearable devices and algorithms released by Huami in the past, health and exercise have become its main product features.
In the field of health, wearable devices can sense, record, analyze, and manage relevant data with the support of relevant software, allowing users to perceive physical conditions more intuitively. Huami focuses on health, closely follows the actual needs and characteristics of wearable products, and fulfills its mission of "using technology to connect health".
Prior to this, the heart rate engine launched by Huami monitors irregular heartbeats and atrial fibrillation 24 hours a day. Whether it is a heart attack or irregular heart beating caused by staying up late at night, any subtle differences Signals will be captured.
Not only that, Huami innovatively uses blood oxygen detection for sleep apnea syndrome. Once it detects that breathing is blocked and blood oxygen drops rapidly, Huami’s smart watch will immediately vibrate to remind you. , save a life.
But humans are complex living beings, and there are many problems that technology and intelligence cannot currently solve, such as blood pressure. At present, hypertension has become a common disease and frequently-occurring disease worldwide, and is also the main risk factor for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Data show that the number of patients with hypertension in my country has reached 245 million, and the number of deaths related to hypertension is as high as 2 million every year.
Using technology to monitor blood pressure is much more complicated than heart rate. Because heart rate measurement is a frequency measurement, as long as the frequency of the pulse wave beating is monitored, the structural information, morphological information and related information of the pulse wave itself are not very concerned.
Blood pressure is different. Blood pressure needs to monitor pulse wave fluctuation information. It requires not only frequency information, but also morphological information. It is much more complicated to use optical sensors to monitor and obtain relevant information. , and will also be affected by individual differences such as skin, hair, and sitting posture.
Based on the third-generation sensor and blood pressure research algorithm, Huami continuously collects data from hypertensive patients for continuous improvement, and successfully developed the PumpBeats blood pressure monitoring engine. Smart watches equipped with this engine can effectively capture blood pressure signals and waveforms and achieve one-click blood pressure measurement in 30 seconds, taking an important step in the field of non-invasive, cuffless blood pressure measurement technology.
According to the data from clinical trials jointly conducted by Huami Technology and Peking University First Hospital ***, by comparing the measured values ????with standard electronic blood pressure monitors, the average absolute deviation of the PumpBeats blood pressure monitoring engine, systolic blood pressure is lower than 5.14 mmHg, and the diastolic blood pressure is lower than 4.88 mmHg, fully verifying the reliability of this technology.
In the future, Huami will continue to promote 24-hour continuous blood pressure monitoring to achieve the perfect combination of nighttime sleep monitoring and passive blood pressure monitoring, and hopes to explore a screening concealment method through long-term monitoring of smart watches. New pathways to hypertension.
Proactive health “treating diseases before they happen” is exactly what Huami is focusing on. Through technological research, more and more ordinary people can more easily obtain their own body data. This data is combined with data from wearable devices and will eventually be integrated into health data on the personal cloud. This is Huami Wearable Health code.
Based on Huami’s own sensors, chips and algorithm capabilities, it can achieve richer health monitoring functions and bring more dimensions of health data to users. As of the end of 2020, Huami's smart wearable devices have recorded more than 151 trillion steps, 12.8 billion nights of sleep, and more than 120.8 billion hours of heart rate recording.
With more and more data, competition barriers will become higher and higher, algorithms will become more and more accurate, and Huami will have a deeper and deeper understanding of users’ health status.
Huang Wang said that for particularly valuable apps, their underlying logic is all about food, clothing, housing and transportation. Another one is health, which is one of the lowest needs of people. In the field of health, Huami will have core competitiveness.
It is precisely because it firmly grasps the real needs of users that Huami's shipments and rankings are firmly at the forefront. Data shows that as of March 31, 2021, Huami’s total global shipments of smart health devices exceeded 170 million units. In the first quarter of this year, the shipments of Huami’s own brands Amazfit and Zepp smart watches have ranked among the world’s Top four.
On the road of technology connecting health, technology helps users’ health, and health has made Huami’s wearable devices possible.
Create a healthy closed-loop ecosystem
Any achievement is not inevitable, but is accumulated continuously from the moment you decide to do it.
Data released by Huami shows that Huami’s investment in R&D has exceeded 400 million yuan each year in the past three years, and its investment last year reached 538 million yuan. If compared with other IoT companies in the same period, the amount of investment has doubled.
Huami’s high investment in research and development has resulted in Huami’s 1,000 patent applications in the field of health. Among them, invention patents account for half, and there are nearly 100 core invention patent applications in the United States. From the perspective of overall competitiveness and commercial value, Huami has become one of the strongest wearable companies in the world in terms of shipments.
Huami, which is good at being small and smart, is different from giants such as Apple. Huang Wang once compared Huami and Apple and believed that "Apple relies on its brand, while we rely on technology and cost supply chain control." .
At the product level, in addition to smart bracelets and smart watches, Huami has also launched treadmills, running shoes and other related peripheral products, which can monitor users' health data in real time through multiple channels and dimensions. At the algorithm level, Huami has also launched its self-developed sports engine, personal health assessment system, heart rate engine, blood oxygen engine, sleep engine, etc.
Now, based on self-developed chips, operating systems, sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms, Huami has objectively begun vertical integration of related industries. Users recognize the value of health and identify with Huami's products. From a system perspective, Huami is already laying out the industrial chain and creating a closed-loop and healthy ecosystem.
Not only that, Huami has cooperated with academician Zhong Nanshan’s team, medical and health software technology company PAI Health, Royal DSM Group of the Netherlands, Prudential Group Asia Company of the United Kingdom, etc., using smart watches as the entrance to establish A powerful human health data analysis engine, the ability and potential to build a health big data platform and build a global health ecosystem.
It is worth noting that Huami’s health products and services are not only limited to the C-side, but also for the B-side. For example, investing in and promoting the research and development of global portable MRI technology will usher in the era of portable MRI, which is expected to enter various medical examination institutions and hospital outpatient clinics. This makes it easier for ordinary people to obtain their own body data, which will be combined with wearable devices in the future to give everyone a clearer understanding of their health.
From a long-term goal perspective, Huami’s ideal ecosystem is to connect health through various wearable devices under the same system to facilitate all aspects of people’s lives.
The progress of technology will not stop. Huami started with hardware, but has always been people-centered. It has built a software and hardware integration strategy of "product services" and entered the field of comprehensive health services step by step. This is Huami's Mi’s ecological dream.
Summary
The vitality of any form of wearable device depends on the capabilities it brings to users. Therefore, to build better wearable devices, companies must provide them with enough effective functions while giving users a simple experience amid complexity.
As for Huami, which focuses on health and ecology, how to maximize the role of smart wearable devices and change people's future lives in the ultimate state is Huami's challenge and Huang Wang's persistence.
The past is already the prologue, everything begins with action and vision!