Editing by Xin Lanhua

Major Chinese mobile phone manufacturers are joining the ranks of producing smartwatches. 

Apart from Huawei, Xiaomi/Amazfit, the list of Chinese smartwatch makers now includes OPPO, Vivo, Honor, Meizu, and Realme, from mobile phone brands. 

IDC data shows that the size of China's smartwatch market expanded in 2020 22.0% year on year to RMB27.2 billion ($4.26 billion). In the first quarter of 2021, Huawei is the No. 2  smart wearable brand in China, with a market share of 22.9 percent. Apple is No. 1, Samsung No.3, IMOO No.4, and Garmin No.5.   

According to a Counterpoint report, the global smartwatch shipments in the second quarter of 2021 increased by 27% compared with last year's same period. 

On the functions of smartwatches,  a Global Market Monitor survey shows most users pay more attention to health checking than making calls, taking video and positioning. More than 70% surveyed consumers would give priority to this function when purchasing,

But industry observers pointed out that such features often require third-party instruments' calibration, which is still behind professional testing equipment. They also raise issues, such as data privacy and security, deviation of test results, medical institution certification, user's psychological acceptance and trust. 

Nevertheless, wearable products including smartwatches can still be one of the important ways for early diagnosis and discovery of cardiovascular diseases in the future.

People in the industry chain think that products of the same price carry similar basic functions but less differentiation, and the accuracy of the data and algorithms still needs to be improved. 

If wearable products such as smartwatches are used as the extension of smartphone functions or screens, they can improve users' experience and portability. The health functions endow these products with practical meaning and give consumers "The reason you must buy". Nowadays, the detection of indicators such as heart rate and sleep is the standard configuration of almost all smartwatches and even smart bracelets. The detected user data will be uploaded to the big data platform for sorting, analyzing and reporting.

Observers noticed that some manufacturers have begun to move towards more complex and specialized functions like blood pressure and blood glucose detecting that require third-party instruments' calibration. 

And compared with professional testing equipment, smartwatches are more susceptible to external environments, such as signal interference, device detachment from skin, power and other factors, resulting in deviations in data results. 

Because of this, the sentence "this product is not a medical device, the results are for reference only and cannot be used for any medical-related purposes." still appears in the smartwatch manual or details page, and this also reflects that the constraints of the smartwatch in this field.

However, with the technology growth and fierce market competition, the boundaries between industries are increasingly broken.