Samsung held a press event today to talk about Simband and their upcoming collaborative venture to improve the state of wearable medical sensors and data accessibility.
The overall tone of the presentation was very positive, though they were surprisingly light on details about the Simband device itself, which is basically a wristwatch platform for a variety of sensors to track an increasing amount of biomedical data (heart rate, blood pressure, eventually even blood oxygenation) continuously on your person.
Also up for presentation was the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, or SAMI for short, a sort of Siri for biomedical data tracker information. The SAMI project will serve as a place for all of your data trackers like your Fitbits, Galaxy Gears, Simbands, etc. to upload their data and be analysed so you can get a picture of where your total physical wellbeing is at at any given point. SAMI is being headed up by Luc Julia, formerly of Apple’s Siri team.
One of the strongest impressions I got from the presentation as a whole is that Samsung is really beginning to embrace the idea of open ecosystems, and hopefully that means there will be fewer Samsung devices that are locked in to only the Samsung ecosystem in the future.
How can it possibly be a surprise to you that they were light on details? They’re always light on details when they’re in a rush to try and beat whatever (fully developed and heavy on details product) they imagine Apple is going to announce at WWDC.
Call me an eternal optimist, I guess.