SKG, officially known as Future Wearable Health Technology Co., Ltd., has signed a collaboration agreement with Peking Union Medical College to jointly develop algorithms for sleep staging and apnea detection using smart wearable devices. The research program will also involve three additional top-tier hospitals serving as multi-center experimental sites. Using polysomnography (PSG) data labeled by medical experts as the gold standard, the teams will train and validate the algorithms, with the final results applied to SKG's XiaoJingWei smartwatch to benefit public health.
Sleep apnea is a chronic condition characterized by high prevalence yet low public awareness. Traditional diagnosis relies on in-hospital polysomnography, requiring patients to wear a multitude of sensors overnight at a sleep center—an experience that is both inconvenient and costly. Extending professional-grade respiratory detection capability from the hospital setting to an everyday wristwatch has therefore become a key technical frontier in the wearable health sector.
Most smartwatches currently on the market rely on single- or dual-channel photoplethysmography (PPG) solutions, which capture a limited range of signals and fall short of clinical standards in sleep apnea detection accuracy. SKG, however, has built a solid academic foundation in this field. In 2024, its research on sleep apnea detection using smartwatch technology was presented at the international academic conference ICCBB. The new partnership with Peking Union Medical College builds on this prior work, using clinical PSG data as the benchmark to further refine the algorithms to clinical-grade precision.
The SKG XiaoJingWei watch will serve as the platform where these research outcomes are commercialized. The device boasts 4-channel raw PPG waveform acquisition, employs both oscillometric and PPG techniques for blood pressure monitoring, and includes AI-based warning features for cardiac and cerebral infarction risks, alongside a linkage mechanism involving human customer service and family alerts. Once the study concludes, the project team will also push for the establishment of relevant industry group standards.