Samsung Beats Apple, Google To The Punch — Introduces Prototype Health Watch
By Jof Enriquez,
Follow me on Twitter @jofenriq
Samsung Electronics unveiled a concept smartwatch with biosensors and an open cloud-based platform to store health information during an event in San Francisco last week. The announcement came a week before rival Apple was expected to announce its new Healthbook app at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
According to a Time article, Samsung’s new Simband device looked like an advanced version of the company's existing Galaxy Gear smartwatch. Samsung characterized Simband as an "investigational device" that will serve as a platform for future devices.
“We decided to start with the wrist, the one location where people wear a device continuously. It’s the one place where it is comfortable enough to wear something 24 by 7,” Ram Fish, VP of digital health at Samsung Electronics, said during the presentation, as quoted in a Venture Beat article.
Simband contains multiple sensors — optical, electronic, physical, and acoustic — that monitor heart rate, heart rhythm, blood pressure, temperature, and blood oxygen levels, according to a Computerworld report. Users can view all readings in real time on the large display of the smartwatch, which is powered by a 1 GHz dual-core Arm A7 processor. Samsung said that third-party vendors could integrate their own biosensors within Simband's Sensor Module, located in the band of the device.
Data gathered by Simband’s sensors will be transferred wirelessly via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth without the need for smartphones. All data from the device will be stored in an open cloud-based platform the company calls SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions), which will analyze patterns and give health recommendations to users, according to Venture Beat. The company said users will retain ownership of their health information stored in SAMI, but could grant researchers permission to study the data to glean health insights.
“This is an approach for engineers and scientists to create new algorithms,” said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer at Samsung Electronics. Samsung will make Simband’s SDK (software development kit) and API (application programming interface) available to developers later this year.
According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Samsung’s introduction of Simband and SAMI beat out expected Google and Apple announcements about similar health-centric smartwatches. In addition, Forbes recently learned that Microsoft will soon be offering a “sensor-rich smartwatch that measures heart rate and synchs with iPhones, Android phones, and Windows Phones.” The increasingly competitive wearables market is projected to reach $8 billion by 2018.
"This market is continuing to be very dynamic. We're beginning to figure out the business model," Ed Yu, a partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers' health industries strategy practice, told the Chronicle. "There are wearable companies that are starting to get (FDA) approvals that put you into a whole new payment stream. That becomes the real deal."
Samsung said startups could help it succeed in developing next-generation wearables. The company also announced a Digital Health Challenge that will grant $50 million to startups interested in developing new sensors and software, according to a BBC report.