UNG NEWS
Samsung's Simband set to live on inside new health monitoring devices
The wearable on steroids is helping to shape the company's health tech plans
![[IMG]](https://static1.wareable.com/media/imager/26196-208f7a931bb11617f532c69930c8f429.jpg)
Wednesday
October 18, 2017
By Husain Sumra
@hsumra
Back in 2014, Samsung unveiled the Simband, a reference wearable that was packed with sensors. It was never intended to go on sale to consumers and was instead designed for developers to play around with.
Those developers were able to use sensors that tracked blood pressure, skin temperature, sweat production, blood volume, heart rate and more. The Simband was considered a reaction to rumors the Apple Watch would be a revolutionary health device. When that turned out to not be the case, Samsung turned its attention to the Galaxy Gear instead.
Read this: The ultimate guide to Samsung Health
The Simband isn't dead though, according to Dr. Francis Ho, Samsung's head of digital health. Samsung Innovation and Strategic Center has still been plugging away on the project with researchers and companies for the past couple of years.
"We invited researchers to come in and use it to do new kinds of studies," he told us. "So we work with many of these top groups in the world and they use it for everything from autism studies to heart arrhythmia studies."
Samsung has also been making investments in digital health to improve upon the Simband. Externally, Samsung has been strategically investing in health-based startups. Internally, it's been developing new technologies for future sensors. Samsung doesn't want to make any announcements yet, but Ho says the company is looking to take ideas from the Simband to build into new commercial products that can health improve health.
Samsung still believes in its "Voice of the Body" concept, which wants to make it as easy as possible for the human body to communicate health information to you through sensors. This includes things like your current state of health, but also studying the environment that affects your health, from the food you eat to your sleep quality. Also included in this idea is the idea of helping to predict or detect cancer at an earlier stage to make it easier to treat.
It's nice to see that Samsung is still immensely serious in health. It's easy to forget, as Samsung Mobile has taken the lead on wearables with the Gear devices. It turns out another Samsung division, Samsung Innovation and Strategic Center has still been plugging away on the future of wearable health monitoring devices.
Commentary-this is a tool for them to work on SERIOUS health. It does NOT look to B a 5th wrist device on shelves.
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So this is it most likely. Has not been seen for a while...
Now the time delay sort of makes sense.
It certainly is a new category for Samsung.
Will it sell when it comes to market.
Perhaps they will sell it differently and get insurance companies to send them out?
Without QUIKs words I had thought this thing will NOT come to market. A research project.
But again it has NOT been seen for several yrs now, so we don't know how it has evolved.
Last edited:
Today at 6:58 AM
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Samsung To Combine Simband Concepts Into New Health Devices
October 18, 2017 - Written By Manny Reyes
Samsung looks to borrow concepts from the Simband platform it launched in 2014 as a reference for new health monitoring devices it plans to build in the near future, according to Francis Ho, chief of digital health at the company. For those who are not familiar with Samsung Simband, as it has stopped making the rounds in the internet quite a while back, it was a proof-of-concept announced three years ago in a bid to respond to the imminent debut of Apple Watch in the same year. The company intended for Simband to gather health data through monitoring sensors incorporated into the platform.
The platform was a major part of the Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions (SAMI) program meant not as a commercial product, but as a resource to help developers build devices that could track blood pressure, heart rate, sweat production, oxygen levels, glucose levels and other bodily activities related to human health. The idea was for SAMI to collect and analyze those pieces of data. Samsung later shifted its focus to the Samsung Gear family of smartwatches and away from Simband after the South Korean company saw that the Apple Watch did not significantly shake the health devices market. A few years later, it turns out that the original equipment manufacturer has still been silently developing Simband through its tech investments arm Samsung Innovation and Strategic Center. Ho revealed that for the last few years, Samsung has been working with researchers and other companies to perform new health-related studies that use ideas from Simband. That means it is possible that the Simband concept could still be introduced into future health monitoring devices as Samsung has been heavily investing in digital health monitoring tools and solutions created by external startups and in new sensor technologies built inside its own labs.
It would have been interesting to see how developers would have been able to create health monitoring apps by gaining access to information uploaded by Simband-based devices to SAMI through the cloud. Nonetheless, Samsung has been advancing its efforts in this segment with the Samsung Health app embedded in the Gear family of wearable devices. It remains to be seen what role Simband concepts will play in Samsung’s push to beef up its position in the health device market.
SO it looks like we will find out in '18...I wonder what they will name it?
So we will have 2 medical grade devices shipping in first half '18?
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