When Apple is getting ready to reveal its new releases in WWDC 2014, how can the korean giant remain in silence? Having a major hold in the smartphone industry, the company doesn’t want to miss any chance. The company knows the next main thing would be the wearables and the healthcare applications.
Samsung announced the Simband device and the SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimedia Interaction) platform at a press event held in San Francisco. Samsung Simband features a new sensor-filled watch and a cloud platform for storing health data collected by the device.
In simple term, the Simband collects information and sends to SAMI cloud for storage.
Samsung has released a prototype wristband, that is more similar to the wearable watches that are expected to take hold of the market. It can be fitted with third-party sensors that helps in gathering a range of health data about the wearer’s body. And the wristband has been named Simband.
The Simband is no bigger than a normal band, except for it has monitor to keep you updated and monitor our heartbeats, blood sugar level, calorie intake, respiration, galvanic skin response, hydration, gas and insulin level in blood, as well as data about substances carried in the surrounding air. The wonderful part that all these are on a device no bigger than the smart watches.
The whole ecosystem is built around the SAMI platform and Samsung says
“This is designed to sit between devices that collect data , and algorithms in the cloud that analyse the data”.
The SAMI serves the brain of this whole set up, the more information the device sends, the more information is stored in the cloud making a clear insight of a person’s medical record. SAMI is open and easily accessible, but at the same time it will provide a high level security used by banking sectors says Ram Fish, Samsung’s VP of digital health.
The Simband has an array of sensors on the lower part, that monitors various body activities and it can be expanded with extra piece of hardware to track other things. A live demo was made wherein the band was able to show Fish’s live heart rate and other vital information on the device.
For SAMI to be truly successful,health care organisations will need to buy into the concept and find ways to use the data. Samsung hopes a lot of company will produce apps and devices that feeds data into SAMI cloud.
Also the API’s and the development kit will be out later this year. It will host a developer conference, and even put up $50 million in venture capital for startups that choose to build on the Simband platform.