Samsung is going for the mHealth market, bit time. During the event in San Francisco, the Korean company announced “Voice of the Body,” an open software and hardware platform for personal health monitoring.
SIMBAND is an open hardware-based wrist band that allows developers and device makers to easily add their own modifications.The platform consists of multiple parts, one of which is a modular wrist band called SIMBAND. Designed as an open hardware, it will allow both developers and device makers to easily modify parts, adding new sensors as they please. The basic setup is half the size of a microSD card, while the rest of the band is used to house different sensors.
The second part of the equation is SAMI, which stands for Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions. It’s a cloud-based data platform, which too will be open source and allow end-users to be owners of their own data. Not a single entity, including Samsung, will take ownership of the information stored in the service, the fact that should spur adoption. Or at least, that’s what Samsung is hoping.
Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions (SAMI) is a cloud-based, open-source data platform where users’ data will be stored.The final part is the eco-system Samsung has already started establishing. The small ARM-based chip on the SIMBAND was made by IMEC, and there’s also the partnership with University of California, San Francisco Medical Center. More players are involved and more are coming.
The SIMBAND developer’s kit and open APIs for SAMI will be available later this year. Like that’s not enough, Samsung will also hold a developer conference and set aside $50 million in funding towards developers and entrepreneurs that bring new technology and ideas that can enhance the ecosystem.
Samsung is the world’s biggest handset maker and one of the biggest forces in the mobile industry. It has all the resources in the world to bring mHealth technologies to the mainstream consumer. As part of those efforts, the company’s latest flagship device, Galaxy S5, was launched as the world’s first smartphone with a built-in heart rate sensor.