It’s hardly news that Samsung is serious about the wearables market, but it now appears that it intends to put its considerable global weight behind a health-tracking platform and a set of health-related APIs.
The Simband reference device and the SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interface) platform tie together sensors, software, and cloud. The president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics, Young Sohn, called it “the greatest single opportunity of our generation.” The company is working on next-generation sensors and a set of healthcare APIs. The effort is being headed by Ram Fish, VP of digital health.
Hyperbole aside (and we tend to agree with Sohn more than not), Samsung is putting up $50 million in investment capital for companies working on healthcare tracking products.
None of this is actually a product yet, or likely to be for some months. Our guess is that the announcement came because Apple’s big developers’ conference is next week and Samsung wanted to take some wind out of Apple’s sails. Also, there’s a lot of tech news coming out of the first Code conference in deference to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, whose new competition to their old All Things D conference is running this week.
The hardcore tech:
The softer marketing pitch:
