The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 10

INDUSTRY
NEWS
News and Information for
Digital Health Professionals

Samsung Launches Major Digital
Health Initiative
opportunity for the brightest minds in the technology world to
come together to develop the products that will, for the first
time, put individuals in the driver's seat in understanding their
own health and wellness,” said Young Sohn, president and chief
strategy officer of Device Solutions at Samsung. “At a time when
healthcare spending is at record levels and when the number of
people over the age of 60 worldwide is expected to exceed more
than 1.2 billion by 2025, digital health is an incredibly important
area for innovation. We believe this initiative will be an essential
first step and we invite developers and partners across the globe
to join us in creating the technologies of the future that will help
make people's lives healthier.”

OPEN HARDWARE PLATFORM
Samsung Electronics has launched a bold initiative aimed at
directing the resources and innovation of the global technology
industry toward empowering individuals to better manage their
own health and wellness. The Samsung Digital Health Initiative is based on open hardware and software platforms that will
accelerate the development of advanced sensors, algorithms,
and data collection and analysis.

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At an event in San Francisco this month, Samsung's Strategy
and Innovation Centre team demonstrated its open platform in
a wearable wristband form factor, showing devices built, based
on this reference-design 'blueprint', could be used to track measurements such as heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure. The company also demonstrated its open software architecture and how it could be used to collect data from a variety of
sources, aggregate it and display it in a form that consumers can
use to better understand what is taking place within their bodies.
The open platforms, combined with agreements like the one
recently announced by Samsung and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to validate new approaches to personal health and wellness, are designed to help developers bring
innovative products to market more quickly.
“Samsung's Digital Health Initiative provides an exciting

June 2014

Samsung's Simband is an open hardware reference design for
wearable technology, capable of integrating the most advanced
sensing technologies in the world. Simband is being designed
in a modular way, allowing for innovation in areas like battery
life, form factor and noninvasive sensor technology by different companies. Innovators are being invited to use the reference platform to create and contribute their own advanced sensors, algorithms and other technologies. Simband is a reference
design Samsung and third-parties will use to develop products.
It will not be sold commercially. This approach is intended to
lead to the creation of a hardware and algorithms ecosystem
that will enable new technology and innovation to be easily built
into finished products.

OPEN SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE
The Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions (SAMI)
will be a cloud-based open software platform capable of bringing together fragmented data from a variety of sources for analysis. It will allow devices and sensors to securely store data in
the cloud regardless of the source's format or structure. SAMI's
job is to make more information available, to break open information silos and give applications and services access to large
amounts of data to provide better insights. Under Samsung's