Huawei opens biggest Health Lab yet. Here’s what they plan to do with it.

Huawei just opened its largest Health Lab yet in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, China. They have multiple other sites, but this is definitely the most impressive one so far, coming in at 4,680 square meters of research space.

So what exactly is a Huawei Health Lab? No, it’s not a place to get spas and detoxes. It’s a lab that’s designed to be a hub for sports and health R&D, not only for Huawei’s wearables but for other organisations too. Huawei said that the research done in the Health Lab doesn’t really inform the design of their wearables. The data is mostly used for improving their Huawei Health app features like vitals and workout tracking.

Huawei’s lab in Xi’an is currently focusing on innovative health and fitness technologies, while the new Songshan Lake Health Lab is designed for things like standards R&D, certification and exhibitions.

What’s inside the new Huawei Health Lab?

Being quite large, the lab has a range of different spaces and equipment, including a motion capture system with 28 high-speed infrared cameras with a peak sampling rate of 10,000 Hz. This would be used for sports analysis and is able to record moving bullets with millimeter-level accuracy.

There’s also an exercise physiology research area where researchers can monitor the VO2 max, calorie consumption, and heart rate. Prior to releasing the Huawei Watch GT Runner, the lab captured about 192,500km of running data this year alone. This lab is responsible for enabling the many workout modes currently available on Huawei wearables.

In the Songshan Health Lab, you can also get a ‘micro-physical examination’ where you use Huawei wearables to measure your physical indicators like blood pressure and SpO2. Along with that, you can exercise at the indoor fitness area and compete with your friends in the digital sports area. This means it could be a useful place for competitive athletes to analyse their performances, especially for big events like the Olympics.

Huawei’s health research program is much bigger than I thought, with more than five million users joining the program. There are also over 83 million global average monthly active users of the Huawei Health App.

So is this the future of health and sports science? Not really. It’s a large health lab, but Nike’s Sport Research Lab in Oregon is much bigger at 7803 square meters. Still, the Songshan Lake Health Lab is one of the biggest of its kind in Asia, and I hope that a health lab of this calibre will open in Malaysia soon.