Garmin is teaming up with King’s College London on an ambitious project looking at maternal health, tracking 40,000 smartwatch users through pregnancy in hopes of better understanding — and ultimately improving — outcomes for parents and babies. The work, which is part of the Enhanced Maternal and Baby Results with Innovative Sensors and Mobile Apps (EMBRACE) program, will convert continuous data from sensors into clinical insights that could lead to earlier discovery of risks and better-informed customized care.
Researchers hope to enrol participants from a variety of locations in the UK, Canada, China, Ghana, Peru and Spain, which would help make it one of the largest and most geographically diverse wearable-based pregnancy studies so far. According to Garmin Health, the partnership is the company’s largest research project thus far and inarguably represents a burgeoning role for consumer devices in formalized clinical investigations.
Why a 40,000-person participant group matters in this study
A cohort of this size is set up to spot more subtle, earlier signals of common complications than smaller studies may miss; gestational diabetes affects an estimated 6–9% of pregnancies in higher-income countries and up to 14% globally, and hypertensive disorders occur in about 5–10% and are a leading cause of maternal morbidity, according to public health agencies and the World Health Organization. One in seven parents are also affected by perinatal depression. By being able to measure the trajectory of real-world, longitudinal physiology from tens of thousands of individuals, it becomes possible to have sufficient statistical power to know how it is that these conditions unfold — and in whom.
Moreover, large, long datasets allow for comparisons of trajectories by age, baseline fitness and body mass, coexisting conditions and social determinants of health. Crucially, EMBRACE will also track partners’ levels of physical activity in light of increasing evidence that household behaviors impact pregnancy and early childhood outcomes.
What smartwatches will measure during pregnancy monitoring
A Garmin device worn by participants will record heart rate, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), duration and depth of sleep, levels of activity intensity and energy spent, beat-to-beat intervals and the company’s Body Battery metric. Those signals are similar to what happens in the body during pregnancy; an individual’s resting heart rate usually goes up, HRV can go down as cardiovascular load increases and sleep typically becomes fragmented — when measured at scale, these behaviors make for early warning signs of complications.
The study fits into an “exercise-as-medicine” philosophy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists endorses a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week in the absence of complications during pregnancy; however, compliance is poor. Researchers at King’s College London said many expectant parents fall short of these goals, and the EMBRACE program is intended to change that. The program’s target of reducing gestational diabetes and pregnancy hypertension rates by up to 40% relies on fundamentals such as feedback loops (objective activity data, supportive coaching and clinical escalation at the right time) instead of waiting months, or even years, in some cases.
AI models looking to raise flags sooner in prenatal care
Machine learning will be at the heart of it, collecting wearable signals with study questionnaires and clinical data to produce risk scores for conditions such as gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders and perinatal depression. Previous peer-reviewed studies in digital health have also shown that variations in HRV, resting heart rate and sleep can precede clinical symptoms in contexts ranging from infection detection to glucose control. EMBRACE aims to apply these insights in obstetrics, producing validated “digital biomarkers” for pregnancy.
The promise is continuous, low-burden monitoring between prenatal visits — not to replace clinicians, but to nudge earlier testing, reinforce beneficial behaviors and personalize care plans. If successful, the research could offer proof that everyday wearables can be a meaningful addition to typical prenatal pathways — particularly in geographies where people have less access to frequent in-person care.
Privacy, consent, and representation in wearable studies
Any longitudinal study on this scale needs to balance scientific ambition with scrupulous safeguards. Participation would be based on informed consent, and researchers often de-identify wearable device data, encrypt the data and work with institutional ethics approvals. Open communication about what is gathered, how the information gets used, and who could have access to it will be crucial in keeping trust over months of follow-ups.
Diversity is also crucial in sensor research. Validation studies by others report that performance of the optical heart rate can be influenced by motion, perfusion and skin pigmentation. By recruiting participants in six countries, with diverse backgrounds, the study can look at how well algorithms work and whether they provide a fair amount of benefit — necessary tests before digital interventions are rolled out broadly in prenatal care.
What success might look like for prenatal wearable research
More than just a headline number of enrolled people, the study’s impact will be judged by what are called clinical endpoints. Cutting gestational diabetes and pregnancy hypertension by even a few percentage points could lead to fewer preterm births, cesarean deliveries and admissions to neonatal intensive care — facts well known to public health agencies and reflected in obstetric guidelines. There are economic consequences as well: complications are a huge cost for health systems and families; prevention pays off.
Researchers have already used wearables to track infections, sleep disorders and cardiovascular recovery. Using the same approach, but toward pregnancy — and at a population level, with clinical muscle behind it — might help reset expectations for prenatal support. And if EMBRACE achieves its goals, it will provide a roadmap for how consumer-grade products in the right hands can become precision tools in maternal and newborn health.