SHAH ALAM: Garmin wearables will support the wellness component of approximately 500 AI Living residences at i-City, as part of a strategic collaboration between Garmin Malaysia and i-City to develop a more connected, wellness-enabled residential living experience for more Malaysians.

Rather than offering wearable devices simply as an accessory to the home, AI Living @ i-City, intends to incorporate wellness insights enabled by Garmin wearables into its connected living environment alongside robotics, lifestyle technologies and building systems work together to deliver better care, convenience, comfort and community.

As part of the collaboration, Garmin is intended to be positioned as the wearable platform for AI Living, providing the wellness sensing foundation that can support personalised wellness, preventive health monitoring and lifestyle optimisation.

The initial deployment is intended to cover the approximately 500 AI Living residences, with the potential for multiple devices per household. Both parties may also explore opportunities to expand the usage of Garmin wearables and related wellness capabilities as the AI Living concept develops across i-City.

According to i-City chairman Tan Sri Lim Kim Hong, the alliance reflects the difference between AI Living and today’s smart homes.

“The smart home has traditionally been about getting people to control their homes through technology. AI Living turns that around – we want technology to understand the person and respond to their needs.

“Garmin provides us with an established wearable ecosystem through which the home can begin to understand the wellness needs of its residents. The objective is not another gadget or app, but an AI Living lifestyle where technology works naturally in the background to support better care, convenience and comfort.”

Within the AI Living architecture, Garmin wearables will provide the wellness sensing platform, while JoiiUp, a Garmin ecosystem partner, will provide the AI wellness application and intelligence layer.

Wellness signals may, subject to future technical, commercial and regulatory consideration, be integrated into UrbanOS, the intelligent orchestration platform being developed, creating a pathway for wellness insights to interact with robotics, lifestyle technologies and intelligent building systems.

Potential applications being explored may include wellness tracking, sleep and recovery insights, and stress monitoring, personalised wellness recommendations.

The strategic alliance also creates an opportunity for i-City to explore the use of its residential environment as a setting for developing and experiencing future connected wellness applications.

Garmin Malaysia country manager Jimmy Chuang said, “Wearable technology is increasingly becoming part of how people understand and manage their health and well-being”.

“Through this collaboration, we are exploring how Garmin’s wearables ecosystem can contribute to a more connected wellness experience within i-City’s AI Living environment, extending wellness beyond the individual device and into everyday living.” 

With AI Living targeted for completion in 2030, the wellness platform is intended to evolve alongside future advances in wearable sensing, artificial intelligence (AI), preventive wellness and digital health technologies over the coming years.

This follows i-City’s earlier announcement to develop AI Living as an AI-native residential environment bringing together robotics, wellness, lifestyle technologies and intelligent building systems to deliver better care, convenience, comfort and community.

JoiiUp founder and chief executive officer Dr Herman Chen Li-Yang said, “Most wellness platforms today operate independently of the environments in which people live. 

“AI Living is taking a different approach by exploring how wearable wellness data, wellness intelligence and intelligent living systems can work together as part of a single ecosystem.

“This has the potential to create a new benchmark for how technology can support healthier, longer and more fulfilling lives.”

AI Living represents the first deployment environment for i-City’s broader ambition to transform the remaining development of the ultrapolis into an AI and robotics-enabled urban centre.

i-City has approximately RM5bil in remaining development potential, around five times the scale of the AI Living development. Under the strategic alliance with its partners, i-City will explore opportunities for the wearable ecosystem to expand alongside the broader development of i-City.

For i-City, this means the approximately 500 AI Living residences will serve not only as homes but as an initial real-world environment in which wellness, robotics, AI and intelligent infrastructure can be progressively integrated and refined.

As AI Living moves towards its targeted 2030 completion, i-City believes homes of the future will increasingly be differentiated not by the number of smart devices they contain, but by how intelligently those technologies work together around the people who live there.

Specific implementation details will continue to evolve as the project progresses.