Neither Apple nor Garmin offer this: New Honor smartwatch comes with innovative heart health feature

Honor has announced a new smartwatch. The Watch GS 5 will become available for preorder on January 19, at least on the Chinese market. It’s still unclear if or when the Honor Watch GS 5 will hit other markets. However, launch in Europe is somewhat plausible, as Honor officially sells its other smartwatches there. It’s also worth noting that we have already reviewed some of the brand’s wearables.

With that out of the way, no detailed technical specifications or price details for the Watch GS 5 have been revealed thus far. Instead, Honor has teased specific features and published a few pictures. According to Honor, the smartwatch weighs just 0.92 oz and is 0.39 inches thick. Battery life is advertised at up to 23 days, which probably applies to a pretty restrictive power-saving mode.

According to Honor, the smartwatch is intended to assess cardiovascular risk and effectively warn of an impending cardiac arrest. How exactly this feature works and whether it will receive the required medical device certification in Europe and other regions remains unclear. Other smartwatches also indirectly evaluate cardiovascular risks, but these are usually focused on fitness.

Specifically, Honor is promoting the measurement of the heart’s deceleration capacity. Simply put, this number represents the ability to slow the heart rate and, to the best of our knowledge, is not recorded by other wearables from Apple, Garmin or other notable brands. In medicine, deceleration capacity is not an entirely new parameter, but it is also not fully established in everyday clinical practice as the actual heart rate or an ECG analysis, to name just two examples.