Not content to stop at fitness bands
and smartphones with heart monitors,
Samsung today showed off a new
prototype wrist monitor while
announcing a new cloud-based health
data service that aggregates all your
readings from different devices. At an
event in San Francisco, the Korean tech
giant talked about its desire to create
an open platform for digital health
information that doctors, developers
and patients can all take advantage of.
Samsung Architecture for Multimodal
Interactions (SAMI), will be a cloud-
based open software platform, where a
variety of devices and sensors can
securely store data. Developers and
scientists can then create algorithms to
analyze the data, and find new insights,
Samsung says. The personal data stored
in SAMI will still be owned by the
individual and is totally secure, like
money in bank.
SAMI will allow your many health and
environmental sensors to collaborate in
the cloud. Your fitness tracker usually
can't communicate with your
thermostat, but through SAMI,
developers could design an app that
turns the temperature down when you
come back from a run, Samsung said.
"We want to provide a platform to
accelerate the speed of innovation,"
Young Sohn, president and chief
strategy officer at Samsung, said at
the event.
The company also showed off a
wearable wristband called Simband,
which is intended to serve as a
reference design for future devices
rather a shipping product. It is designed
in sections, or modules, so that other
companies can integrate their own
sensors. The open platform will allow for
the inclusion of sensors that haven't
even been imagined yet, said Ram Fish,
vice president of digital health at
Samsung.
Samsung Simband
Future Simband sensors could include a
PPG sensor to measures changes in blood
flow, and monitor vital signs such as
heart rate and blood pressure, and an
ECG sensor to monitor the rate and
regularity of the heartbeat. Fish
demonstrated how a Simband prototype
could continuously monitor heart rate
and other vital signs.
The Simband can be charged with a
"shuttle battery" that is attached, and
charges while the user wears the device,
Fish said.
Samsung has partnered with the
University of California, San Francisco
to work on validating the technologies
and algorithms that come out of the
project, to ensure that the technology is
accurate, and that healthcare
professions feel they can rely on the
devices, said Dr. Michael Blum, associate
vice chancellor for informatics at UCSF.
"This is a really exciting time for the
medical community to engage with
Silicon Valley," Blum said. "We can
collect massive new datasets" to develop
new understandings about how our
bodies work, he said.
Samsung said that the beta APIs for
SAMI would be ready by the end of the
year.
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