Samsung revealed the SAMI, or the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, along with its smart watch prototype named the Simband, which is designed to work with the SAMI platform.
The SAMI and Simband are part of Samsung's digital health initiative, which has the company calling out to developers to join the movement. The Simband follows Samsung's Gear Fit smart watch, which has a focus on digital health.
"Samsung's Digital Health Initiative provides an exciting 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, Samsung president and chief strategy officer for device solutions.
The Simband was designed by Samsung to incorporate sensors from third-party vendors. Powered by a 1 GHz dual-core Arm A7 processor within a motherboard that's smaller than an SD card, the watch will be able to display both time and data on the user's personal health
The Simband Sensor Module can accommodate physical, optical and electrical sensors, making it a possible common platform for the development and implementation of wearable sensors, even from different manufacturers, all at the same time. This makes it possible for developers to focus on creating sensors, as they would not need to create a device from scratch to use it. The data from the sensors can then be collected by SAMI, which in turn can forward the data to third-party apps for processing.
"It's not about the device collecting data, it's what you do with the data," said Ed Yu, PricewaterhouseCoopers' health industries strategy practice partner.
"Data becomes interesting because it inherently has value if you can create useful information out of data," he said. "How am I doing relative to care for my predisposition for diabetes, or high blood pressure? I would find it valuable and I would pay."
Free APIs for SAMI will be released by Samsung at the company's second annual developers conference in November this year.
One of Samsung's first partners for this initiative is the University of California at San Francisco, where researchers and software developers have been given access to Samsung tools for studying biological data.
"Our bodies have always had something to say but now, with advanced sensors, algorithms and software, we will finally be able to tune into what the body is telling us," said Michael Blum, associate vice chancellor for informatics at UCSF.
To promote its digital health initiative, the company also announced the launch of the Samsung Digital Health Challenge, which is a competition for a $50 million investment fund for digital health technologies and startups.
