Samsung reveals Simband and Sami health platform
It also discussed plans to store and share the information to offer insights to both the user and researchers, BBC News reports. The Simband device and Sami (Samsung Architecture Multimedia Interactions) platform were announced at a press event held in San Francisco. One expert said their fate might depend on the quality of data gathered. Samsung discussed being able to take precise readings for heart rate, blood flow, respiration, galvanic skin response, hydration, and gas and glucose concentrations in the blood among other body readings, as well as data about substances carried in the surrounding air - all on a device no bigger than existing smartwatches. Dr Aiden Doherty, a senior health researcher at the University of Oxford, noted that experts currently required more bulky, costly equipment to do this reliably. "There's a tension because medical devices have to undergo rigorous checks while consumer devices don't," he told the BBC. "For any company or university or health researcher the number one thing is that a device provides accurate output, otherwise inaccurate data would mean our insights would be inaccurate too." Health data custodian The South Korean firm has teamed up with Imec - a nanoelectronics research centre based in Belgium - and the University of California, San Francisco, to create the digital health initiative. Samsung Electronic's chief strategy officer Young Sohn noted that the idea would only come to fruition if "we all work together as one", signalling the firm's need for other health and tech professionals to take part if Sami was to become an industry standard. To that end, it promised it would have a "beta" version of both the Simband and APIs (application program interfaces) for the cloud-based Sami data repository available by the end of the year, so that other developers could test ways to use them to collect and share data. Many company watchers noted that the announcement appeared shortly before Apple's developers conference, which begins on Monday. The iPhone-maker is known to have recruited several health sensor researchers of its own over recent years, and there is speculation it will detail plans for its own health data platform. Although Samsung made clear that users would have control over how data was shared and described Sami as a "custodian", it is well aware of the potential profits the health sector holds. The firm noted itself at the event that $6.5 trillion (£3.9tn) was currently spent a year on global healthcare. The consultancy firm IHS Technology recently forecast that the global market for fitness, sports and activity monitors would rise from $1.9bn last year to $2.8bn in 2018. Details also at
