Your Step Counter May Do More Than Track Movement—It Could Keep Diabetes In Check

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Garmin Health used its summit on Wednesday (28 Oct) to highlight the wrist as a clinical tool and to highlight recent grant initiatives supporting global research on type 2 diabetes and metabolic health. 

The Garmin Health Summit, held 28 to 29 October in Bangkok, Thailand, brings together specialists in digital health and wearable technology.

The event opened with a showcase of the company’s enterprise scale, then moved on to its health products and clinical partnerships. 

Susan Lyman, Vice President of Consumer Sales and Marketing at Garmin International, set the scene.

Coinciding with the summit, Garmin reported a massive trajectory, originally hitting record full-year revenues of US$7.25 billion (RM29.47 billion) for 2025.

Driven by strong wearable demand, the company officially raised its full-year 2026 revenue target to approximately US$8.15 billion (RM33.12 billion).

The company continues to ship tens of millions of products annually and launches more than 100 new ones each year.

Lyman also highlighted the Garmin Index Sleep Monitor, an innovative wellness device for comprehensive sleep-health tracking that requires no subscription. 

The core Garmin Connect ecosystem remains entirely free to use, though advanced premium features and AI insights are layered into tiered additions like the newly expanding Connect+ ecosystem.

Following Lyman, Jörn Watzke, Senior Director of Garmin Health Global Sales, outlined the expanding scope of the global Garmin Health business division.

Watzke introduced the overarching theme of the event by framing consistent lifestyle tracking as a non-pharmaceutical “super pill” for preventative health, noting that millions of data points are useless unless simplified into actionable, daily guidance that empowers users to live healthier lives

Shifting to how this massive volume of wearable data is being used, Scott Burgett, Senior Director of Garmin Health Engineering, detailed key medical partnerships.

He highlighted Garmin’s collaboration with Orbit Health—a digital health company that uses AI to continuously track Parkinson’s disease symptoms via smartwatch sensors—to help clinicians optimise medication management.

Burgett also showcased a breakthrough diabetes “digital twin” platform built by Twin Health.

By integrating biometric data from Garmin wearables with other health metrics, the platform creates a personalised metabolic model.

According to data Burgett presented from an interim study, 84% of participants who followed the program’s guidance achieved type 2 diabetes remission within six months.

The morning transitioned to a dedicated “Longevity + Wellness” panel featuring international experts, including Dr Sangita Reddy, Joint Managing Director of Apollo Health, Garmin Health Summit 2026 award finalist Takahiro Masuda, and summit speaker Jaemy Park, CEO of digital therapeutics developer Thyroscope.

The panel offered broader insights into how the Garmin Health ecosystem seamlessly connects and integrates into diverse corporate and clinical frameworks.

By granting third-party platforms secure access to high-resolution, continuous wearable data, Garmin enables partners to build specialised, data-driven health solutions.

Thyroscope was highlighted as a prime example of this ecosystem integration.

By feeding continuous sleep heart rate data collected from Garmin wearables into Thyroscope’s proprietary algorithms, the technology tracks heart rate patterns as a digital biomarker.

This allows healthcare providers to monitor subtle physiological changes for thyroid dysfunction in everyday life, enabling earlier symptom detection and more precise medication dose adjustments.

Shifting from clinical data to preventative lifestyle habits, the presentations linked consistent movement directly to reduced disease risk, citing significant impacts on diabetes, cancer, and overall healthy life expectancy.

Specifically, the data showed that increasing daily activity from 5,000 to 10,000 steps several times a week can cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 57%.

To reinforce this connection between physical movement and mental wellness, Dr Francesco Pagnini—a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, a longtime mind-body research associate at Harvard University, and a scientific collaborator with the Italian Navy on stress and isolation dynamics in extreme environments—led a session focused on mind-body research.

Garmin highlighted its landmark Health and Happiness Study, a collaborative project launched alongside researchers from Harvard University and the University of Oxford.

The ongoing research, initially evaluating a cohort of approximately 5,000 participants, utilises real-time wearable biometrics to demonstrate a strong, direct correlation between consistent daily movement, adequate sleep, and improved emotional well-being.

On the commercial front, Garmin’s enterprise ecosystem is experiencing rapid growth, driven by key partnerships with global insurance giants like Vitality and local health networks.

The company reported that its B2B engagement with government and healthcare partners across Asia surged by 25% over the past year.

Reflecting its expanding footprint in evidence-based medicine, the total number of clinical research studies relying on Garmin devices is projected to jump from 420 last year to over 500 active initiatives this year.

The writer was in Bangkok as a guest of Garmin, which covered travel and accommodation expenses for the Garmin Health Summit. All photos by the writer.

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