Garmin Expands ECG to UK & Switzerland

Garmin has started rolling out ECG app availability to users in both the United Kingdom and Switzerland, joining the US, European Union, Canada, Australia, and numerous other countries. The UK had really been the last remaining ‘big’ western market hole in Garmin’s ECG strategy.

Thankfully, this time they made it available for all Garmin watches that contain the right Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor in it. Whereas back in January they fumbled the rollout to the EU by only initially enabling it for Fenix 8 users, despite all other countries having it on the Fenix 7 Pro. Regardless of whether or not later enablement was previously planned, it was a communications own-goal that only angered users. Thankfully, Garmin relented (planned or otherwise) and enabled it for all EU users with compatible hardware.

As a quick reminder about ECG, the watch requires basically two things:

A) The correct Garmin ELEVATE Gen5 optical HR sensor
B) Being in a country with the Garmin ECG app enabled (on your watch)

Currently supported watches are:

– Garmin D2 Mach Pro
– Garmin Enduro 3
– Garmin Epix Pro
– Garmin Fenix 7 Pro
– Garmin Fenix 8
– Garmin Quatix 7 Pro
– Garmin Tactix 7 AMOLED
– Garmin Tactix 8
– Garmin Venu 3
– Garmin Venu 2 Plus (limited countries only, old sensor)

Again, remember these are basically the watches that have the Garmin Elevate Gen5 optical HR sensor in it.

Countries certify Garmin’s ECG implementation based on the software side of the equation (in concert with the hardware piece). It’s known as ‘Software as a Medical Device’ (SaaMD), and allows entities like the FDA to basically certify a portion of the device (in this case, doing an ECG), rather than certifying the entire device (such as general heart rate monitoring, or sleep tracking). From a technical standpoint, it’s actually much easier to get an accurate ECG trace than it is to be super-accuracy on optical HR tracking in the middle of a messy hill interval session.

In any case, here’s my previous guide on getting started, which only takes a few minutes to walk through the little wizard indicating you know how to perform an ECG, and that most critically, this will not detect heart attacks.

(Note: If you’re on one of the betas, you can’t enable ECG. This is a long-standing safety practice of Garmin, which more recently also applies to dive features too.)

Once the app on the watch performs the ECG, it’ll detect if there are signs of Afib or not. At this point Garmin does not passively detect Afib, which I’d assume will be the next thing that Garmin will aim to get certification on. For most of these tech companies (e.g. Apple, Google, Fitbit, etc…), it’s the act/process of doing their first certification that takes the longest. Once they’ve gotten familiar with the process (which in the case of ECG approval is years, including large scale studies), then they can usually move much faster with subsequent SaaMD features. More on that approval process here.

With that, thanks for reading (and again, here’s that guide)!

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