Garmin Health glimpse: Biometrics and mental well-being

Wearable data is a part of new approaches to mental health interventions

As of 2025, over a billion people are living with mental health issues. That’s roughly 1 in 8 people worldwide. Anxiety and depression are among the most common issues, costing the global economy an estimated $1 trillion U.S. dollars each year. These conditions contribute to chronic stress and burnout, both of which are growing areas of concern in the workplace¹.

While government spending on mental health comprises, on average, only 2% of health budgets globally¹, companies within the private sector and researchers are developing innovative solutions to address the critical need for mental health interventions through digital applications, enabling new options for preventive care.

Analysis of device data, including heart rate variability (HRV), sleep analysis and stress tracking, can improve these emerging therapies, enabling pattern detection and early warning for common mental health issues like burnout and maladaptive stress².

In this Garmin Health glimpse, notable examples demonstrate how the Garmin Health connected ecosystem can provide the wearable devices³ and data integration needed for third-party applications addressing mental health.

Preventing employee burnout

Resilient

The project: Resilient is a Swiss artificial intelligence-driven employee wellbeing platform that aims to prevent burnout and builds resilience at scale. Through a conversational app, Resilient AI fuses biometric, behavioral and contextual data to compute proprietary well-being and resilience scores, deliver personalized micro-interventions, and surface anonymized, department-level early warnings and KPIs for human resources. Built with Swiss clinicians and behavioral scientists, the coach provides support while organizations get privacy-preserving, action-oriented insights.

How Garmin factors in: Garmin wearablesprovide a variety of data for Resilient’s analysis, including heart rate and enhanced beat-to-beat intervals for HRV analysis, sleep sessions and stage timing, Body Battery™ energy monitoring, stress tracking, intensity minutes and activity metrics such as steps, respiration rate and Pulse Ox³. Resilient utilizes both Garmin Health API and Garmin Companion SDK to enable its advanced analyses and integration with contextual and chatbot data.

The goal: Resilient is designed to help people adapt to technological shifts that have changed far faster than biology, addressing a stress system tuned for short-term fight or flight, not the continuous low-level stressors of modern life. It aims to be a practical tool that helps the nervous system recover, form healthier habits, and build resilience to meet the demands of contemporary work and life.

Understanding the impact of stress on learning

National Central University of Taiwan

The project: Through its Uedu learning analytics platform, National Central University of Taiwan serves over 3,000 students across four universities. Research from the project shows students who maintain better autonomic balance, lowering sympathetic activation, during cognitively demanding tasks such as programming exercises achieve significantly greater learning gains. This suggests that stress awareness and regulation are teachable skills that support students’ mental well-being in the classroom.

How Garmin factors in: The Uedu mind module integrates vívoactive® 5 smartwatches with the Garmin Health Companion SDK to stream real-time HRV data during university classes, enabling researchers to monitor the physiological stress responses of students as they learn.

The goal: National Central University of Taiwan hopes that by identifying students experiencing elevated stress in real time, educators can intervene with adaptive support before stress becomes a barrier to learning, shifting reactive care to preventive well-being.

Building emotional independence

A Kind Place

The project: A Kind Place is a Singapore-based company providing professional counseling and psychological services both online and in person. It recently launched A Kind Buddy, a personalized AI wellness companion that helps individuals with autism and intellectual disabilities build emotional independence. The system uses Garmin wearables to learn each person’s unique physiological patterns to detect early signs of stress. It can then respond with tailored calming exercises, guided meditations and coping strategies delivered through the app. Simultaneously, caregivers and trainers receive real-time insights and intervention guidance through a dedicated dashboard.

How Garmin factors in: Participants in the project use Forerunner® 165 smartwatches to monitor heart rate and HRV. Data is integrated into the A Kind Buddy app through Garmin Health API and, over time, the platform analyzes the wearable data to provide increasingly personalized recommendations, adapting to the individual’s unique physiological patterns as the AI learns what works.

The goal: By leveraging biometric data indicative of physiological stress, A Kind Buddy aims to enable those with autism and intellectual disabilities to better address emotional changes through proactive interventions. While the project is still in its initial phase, it could become a template for empowering individuals with unique mental health needs to self-regulate in an innovative, prevention-focused way.

Modifying habits to reduce stress

Coya

The project: Coya helps first responders and law enforcement officers uncover life-changing habits, incorporating data from Garmin smartwatches to help personalize the platform’s guidance. The daily cumulative mental stress experienced by sworn personnel and emergency workers substantially elevates their risks for cardiovascular disease, which is a leading cause of death even during retirement. In addition, research indicates that officers have a higher mortality rate from cancer, circulatory disease and suicide compared with the general population across all age ranges.

How Garmin factors in: Garmin Health API enables Coya to receive daily sleep, HRV and resting heart rate data for each person. Utilizing these biometrics, Coya pairs them with insights and practical takeaways from their expert coaches, educating each officer on how daily habits impact biometrics and mental health.

The goal: Coya methodology that uses Garmin data has helped demonstrate that always “pushing through” has a measurable cost. It also illustrates that small recovery behaviors can help quickly restore nervous system balance, improve sleep quality, HRV and emotional regulation in a notoriously high-stress profession. Through this program, officers and first responders may develop better, lifelong, sustainable coping skills for the mental stress they endure, leading not only to high on-call performance but, potentially, improved personal relationships.

To learn more about how Garmin Health is empowering third-party applications in mental health care and other areas, visit the Garmin Health solutions page for more information or contact us if Garmin wearable technology and the Garmin Health connected ecosystem could play a vital role in your next project. Sign up for the Garmin Health newsletter to stay up to date on the latest trends, research and innovations.

¹_{Over a billion people living with mental health conditions – services require urgent scale-up}

² _{Wearable devices for anxiety & depression: A scoping review}

³_{Garmin devices are not medical devices and are not intended for diagnosing or monitoring any medical condition. See Garmin.com/ataccuracy.}