According to IDC's market research report, in the second quarter of 2020, Huawei's market share of wrist wearable devices ranked first in the world.
So for such a small watch or bracelet, from research and development to production, what test links will it go through before it is handed over to consumers? Titanium media came to Huawei Xi 'an Research Institute to find out.
This is the main base for testing and researching Huawei wearable devices. 12 February 10, a brand-new Huawei health science laboratory was also put into use. The brand-new Huawei Health Laboratory is divided into sports health professional evaluation experimental area and wearable product reliability testing experimental area.
Let's come to the sports health professional evaluation laboratory to experience it first. Take Huawei's latest watch GT 2 Pro smart watch as an example. Support dozens of sports modes such as cross-country running, basketball, golf and swimming. So how to ensure that the data detected by smart watches are highly consistent and available with the data detected by professional equipment?
In the sports health science laboratory, titanium media saw more than 20 kinds of professional testing instruments. Take the most common running as an example. The first is the screening of the contestants, all of whom are athletes from neighboring sports colleges. Before collecting test data, strict privacy protection clauses will be signed to ensure that the data will not be leaked.
The testee will carry a test instrument to test the maximum oxygen consumption and the change of heart rate. At the same time, he will also bring Huawei's WATCH GT 2 Pro watch, and compare the data obtained on the watch with the data obtained on the treadmill professional equipment, so as to debug and correct the data.
In other words, the ultimate goal is to make a small smart watch have the same detection ability as professional equipment after passing various tests.
At the scene, titanium media can also see basketball, golf, bicycles and other training and testing instruments, and the people being tested are professional athletes in related fields.
The golf indoor simulation equipment in the laboratory has played an important role in the research and development stage of Huawei WATCH GT 2 Pro series "Golf Driving Range Mode" function. Professional golf coaches and students are trained and tested here. After 20000 swings, more than 2500 groups of professional data were collected, and finally the function was developed.
The ECG version of the upcoming watch GT2 Pro was also tested here. Heart rate, electrocardiogram and blood oxygen content, which are closely related to our health, can also be compared with the data obtained by professional medical equipment, and the error can be controlled within 3%.
For ordinary consumers, Huawei watches can be used to monitor some physical indicators and find the symptoms of some diseases in advance. Through Huawei Health App, online doctors can test by uploading ECG to determine whether they need to go to the hospital for further treatment.
"In Huawei Health Lab, what matters is not only professional research equipment, but also our researchers and innovative research solutions they have found." Zhang Wei, president of Huawei's consumer business smart wear and sports health product line, said that the professional background of Huawei's health science laboratory researchers spans many disciplines such as computer software, engineering, physics, mathematics, sports and medicine. They collided and merged the experience of their respective professional fields, turned the laboratory into a innovation works with a healthy lifestyle, and "trained" Huawei's intelligent products into reliable "wrist fitness personal education" and "active health housekeeper". "
The experimental area of wearable product reliability test is mainly to carry out various fatigue tests and destructive tests on products, and simulate the situations we may encounter in daily life with various test equipment. The level of detail is amazing, for example, it will simulate the scene where the equipment is put in the bottom pocket of jeans and then sat down and crushed. This situation is often encountered in our life, but here, the same scene will be tested thousands of times with multiple devices at the same time to ensure the reliability of the product.
For example, whether the rubber strap is strong enough will pass the test of torsion and stretching, and the watch itself will also pass the test of high temperature and high salt spray corrosion. Every button will be pressed tens of thousands of times, and even objects of different materials will be used to rub the watch shell to observe the wear resistance.
Due to the strict confidentiality here, we can't take photos of the scene. The photos are all provided by the government.
Titanium media also saw a cabinet with 100 smart watches on the whole surface, testing the firmware upgrade, simulating the firmware upgrade process, and detecting whether there will be problems such as system bugs.
For smart watches, if extending the battery life is an important topic, testers will analyze and test one by one, such as how much power will be consumed by raising the hand to light the screen once, whether a picture is smooth and smooth, and whether it will drop frames.
For another example, Huawei WATCH GT 2 can wear swimming in the water depth range of 1.5 meters, but in the test, it will actually carry out a pressure test up to 10 atmospheric pressure. It can be seen that the test conditions in the laboratory are far higher than the use conditions promised by the products to users. More redundant tests will bring consumers a safer product experience.
Through this visit to Huawei Xi 'an Research Institute, I learned all aspects of a wearable product, from how to improve the accuracy of sports statistics to how to detect the compressive destructive test of the product. Although the product is small, the knowledge inside is really great.
Zhang Wei introduced to titanium media that in the future, Huawei will continue to increase its investment in sports health, and plans to build another sports health laboratory in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, and cooperate with more than 10 scientific research institutes around the world to build a comprehensive research platform for sports health and create an innovative, leading and open Huawei health ecosystem. (This article is the first titanium media App, author/Xiang Ou)