South Korea-based Samsung Electronics has launched a major digital health initiative based on open hardware and software platforms, Simband and SAMI respectively, which will accelerate the development of advanced sensors and algorithms, as well as data collection and analysis.
The new initiative is aimed at directing the resources and innovation of the global technology industry toward empowering individuals to better manage their own health and well being.
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The company’s Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC) team showcased its open platform in wearable wristband form factor at an event at San Francisco’s SFJAZZ Center.
The team showed how devices based on this reference-design could be used to track measurements such as heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure.
Samsung also showed its open software architecture and how it could be used to collect data from several sources, aggregate it and display it in a format allowing consumers to better understand what is taking place within their bodies.
The open platforms are designed to help entrepreneurs bring new products to market more quickly.
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By GlobalDataSamsung and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have recently announced an agreement to validate new technologies for personal health.
Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer of device solutions Young Sohn said: "At a time when healthcare spending is at record levels and when the number of people over the age of 60 worldwide is expected to exceed more than 1.2 billion by 2025, digital health is an incredibly important area for innovation.
"We believe this initiative is an essential first step and we invite developers and partners across the globe to join us in creating the technologies of the future that will help make people’s lives healthier."
The company’s Simband is an open hardware reference design for wearable technology, capable of integrating with advanced sensing technologies.
It is being designed in a modular way, allowing for innovation in areas such as battery life, form factor and noninvasive sensor technology.
The Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions (SAMI) will be a cloud-based open software platform capable of bringing together diverse data from several sources for analysis as well as allow devices and sensors to securely store data in the cloud regardless of the source’s format or structure.
SAMI is aimed at making more information available, to break open information silos and give applications and services access to large amounts of data to provide better insights.
According to Samsung, the combination of Simband-designed sensor technologies and algorithms and SAMI-based software will advance the level of individual understanding of the body.
Image: The incredibly small circuitry for Samsung’s wearable open platform for digital health, Simband. Photo: courtesy of Business Wire.
