Samsung SimBand aims to take a big step in wearable health

Today, there’s the Samsung Gear Fit. But it seems that, if you listened to Samsung president Young Sohn, that’s merely a temporary patch towards what the future of wearable health tech will really bring.

Samsung’s health event, called “Voice of the Body,” happened today. And at it, Sohn, discussed a three phase evolution of health tech, starting with phones, then moving to wearable devices, and finally ending up at wearable sensors. We’re currently in the middle phase.

The next step, unveiled by VP Ram Fish, is SimBand, another health band, but not a smartwatch: its focus is entirely on health tracking, collecting lots of data to share with medical researchers, doctors, and for personal health use. SimBand is designed to be open and modular, and comes studded with a ton of medical sensors.

The SimBand is designed to work with a variety of medical needs and with many sensor technologies, and to eventually work with SIMA, Samsung’s cloud-based solution for collecting and analyzing sensor-based health data.

Unlike something comparatively primitive like the current Samsung Gear 2 and Gear Fit heart-rate watches, the SimBand has multiple sensors, using optical, electrical and physical methods of collecting heart rate, blood flow, temperature, CO2 and oxygen levels, and even simulated blood pressure and displaying real-time electrocardiograph information of it all.

The design looks a bit like most recent Gear watches. There are differences: the battery’s hot-swappable for easy night charging while wearing to enable 24/7 tracking. Inside, an ARM-based processor handles processing of the various sensors.

The goal of SimBand is to offer open APIs for medical use, and to test the SimBand at hospitals and medical institutions. UCSF and the University of Chicago are two institutions that are already working with Samsung and the SimBand.

Stay tuned for more.