Back a few months ago, Samsung showed a reference design for wristware called the Simband. Not meant to be a product, the sensor-laden Simband was released to a limited set of developers to see what they would do with it. Today, at a big developers’ conference in San Francisco, Samsung expanded the program, allowing new developers to enter the program and releasing an SDK for its SAMI consumer health ecosystem.
Samsung is touting SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions) as a “data broker” that will upload health-related information to cloud services. The company describes SAMI’s APIs as “secure” and “open,” claims that we’ll have to take at face value, at least for the time being. The big claim for SAMI is that it will be able to take sensor information and get clear answers to wellness questions that you pose. That implies a level of network-based intelligence that would, in fact, be unique — and that would necessitate regulatory approval.