At its “Voice of the Body” event last night, Samsung introduced a new health platform that it hopes will take wearable sensors and devices to a higher level when it comes to tracking a user's health, by collecting data from various sources and uploading it to the cloud. To this end, Samsung showed off the Simband, a reference wearable device that any manufacturer can use to build their own devices without having to work from the ground up. The Simband comes with an array of sensors that gather various details, such as body temperature, oxygen level, or heart rate. Unlike the Gear smartwatches, Simband is an open platform which Samsung hopes other companies will embrace.
The health platform is called Samsung Multimodal Architecture Interaction (SAMI), and any data stored on the platform by any device based on the Simband can be controlled by the user. Developers will also have access to this data for creating custom applications, but in the end, it is the user who will own said data. For those not wanting to use the Simband as reference for their own device, Samsung will also make available open APIs that developers and manufacturers can use to upload data from their custom wearables to SAMI, a move that Samsung says is a bid to “connect more brains with more sensors.”
While the Simband looks like Samsung's existing smartwatches, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a proper display inside, it's not a product that will go on sale for consumers anytime soon. Instead, it is simply an example of where the Korean manufacturer hopes to take the wearable industry when it comes to health-tracking, and given the open nature of the platform, it shouldn't be long before other companies start to take advantage as the wearables market gets set to be the next big thing in the industry.
