Shares down almost 7% while Garmin lost all year gains

Sep 13, 2018 18:16 GMT  ·  By

According to a report from Barron's Next, Fitbit's shares plunged right after Apple's September 12 event during which Cupertino announced the new Apple Watch Series 4 with ECG and irregular rhythm notification capabilities.

Fitbit Inc is an American company from San Francisco and well-known for its wireless wearable techs such as activity trackers capable of keeping count of the user's number of steps, sleep quality, heart rate, as well as a wide range of personal fitness metrics.

After announcing their own Charge 3 device, Fitbit also unveiled that they are currently working on adding some extra capabilities to their tech among which atrial fibrillation and sleep apnea detection was the most important.

Fitbit told Barron’s Next that "we see the smartwatch category as an opportunity for many companies to be successful. We deliver competitively-priced, high value, cross-platform smartwatches and that allows us to reach to a much broader segment of the population — especially with 80% of smartphone owners around the world using Android.”

The Apple Watch Series 4 was launched with most of the tech Fitbit's working on for their future Charge 4 unit

Unfortunately for Fitbit, Apple had the same plans, and they managed to accomplish them by including almost all the tech the San Francisco company is currently working on within their new Apple Watch model.

Moreover, the Apple Watch Series 4 is capable of taking electrocardiograms (ECG) with the help of the built-in electrical heart sensor and store them in the Health App in PDF format for easy sharing with a doctor.

In addition, the new Apple Watch can also detect low heart rates and irregular heart rhythm suggestive of atrial fibrillation, together with accidental falls which can be used as an automated trigger to make emergency calls.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Apple a De Novo classification for their Apple Watch Series 4 ECG capabilities, but it seems like only for the USA.

Also, during yesterday's keynote, Apple told us that the Apple Watch model will not launch with the ECG feature since their ECG app used to record the electrocardiogram isn't available yet, and it won't be ready at the device's launch either.

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The ECG feature
Fitbit's stock - 5-day graph
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