Qualcomm partners with company that sued Apple – and won – over its smartwatch technology

At this point, smartwatches are expected to tell you more than just the time of day or your step count. So more technology companies have turned to your health, such as tracking sleeping patterns and your heart rate, as the next key upgrade.

San Diego’s Qualcomm has struck a new partnership to do just that with Masimo, a medical technology company, and Google to bring these new tools to your wrist.

The companies are collaborating to expand the features offered on next-generation smartwatches, such as health and wellness tracking tools. The internal technology will benefit manufacturers who are making smartwatches using Google’s operating system.

Though Qualcomm is most known for its chips and modems that power smartphones and laptops, the San Diego company has applied its expertise to a variety of other segments such as cars and virtual reality headsets.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon technology has already been used in a variety of wearable devices including high-end designer smartwatches, a medical alert smartwatch for seniors, FitBits, low-power kids smartwatches, and GPS trackers for pet collars.

“Beginning with Snapdragon W5+ Gen 1, this collaboration will significantly broaden the range of smartwatch choices for consumers and further enhance the already exceptional Wear OS experience,” said Dino Bekis, vice president of wearables and mixed signal solutions at Qualcomm. “With these reference designs, (manufacturers) will benefit from robust, production-ready designs, incorporating Masimo’s state-of-the-art biosensing technology and Qualcomm Technologies’ leading Snapdragon wearable platforms. It will ultimately enable them to seamlessly bring their smartwatches to market rapidly and at scale.”

Joe Kiani, founder and CEO of Masimo, said it was a natural decision for the company to use Qualcomm’s chips to power its latest upcoming smartwatch technology called Masimo Freedom. The forthcoming watch – which is not cleared for medical applications – tracks vitals such as relative hydration, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate and pulse rate.

“In short, Qualcomm Technologies and Masimo engineers are working together to optimize the ‘guts’ of the smartwatch,” Kiani said in the announcement. “Masimo’s ability to craft precision monitoring technologies and advanced signal processing algorithms, combined with meticulously engineered, high-performing, low-power Snapdragon systems, is a compelling foundation.”