Samsung has recently introduced its new SIMBAND platform – a
modular reference program for wearable health sensors for the future generation
of fitness products.
Unveiled at the company’s Voice of the Body event in San
Francisco, the platform promises a more health-focused type of wearable that’s
beyond monitoring users exercise activity. Samsung presented a prototype unit
that came with a number of sensors.
For starters, the prototype unit has an optical light sensor
that detects variations in the absorption of light in a user’s skin in order to
calculate different data such as heart rate and pulse. It even has an ECG
sensor that measures the electrical activity of the heart.
The demo unit came with a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A7
processor, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a new power-efficient shuttle battery.
But since the device has a modular platform, the various
components of the wearable including its optical, electrical and physical components
can be swapped to fit the particular needs of a user. Samsung has also worked
out the software side of the platform with the SDK to arrive in a few months.
Samsung is also planning to integrate the platform into its
existing data-collection system SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal
Interactions) and make the data available to other devices and services. The
company also mentioned that they are working with other companies which may
bring the data collected from the wearables into a system that can come up with
a predictive model for healthcare.
