Samsung launches new initiative and partnerships for health and wellness projects

Projects include improving sleep, examining resilience and frailty, and cardiovascular disease

At the Samsung Developer Conference 2023 (SDC23) in San Francisco on Friday, Samsung Electronics announced a new Open Innovation Initiative that involves a digital health and wellness projects it will be developing through a series of partnerships with institutions that include the MIT Media Lab, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Tulane University School of Medicine, and Samsung Medical Center.

The goal of this research program, the company says, it to "explore enhancements to the digital health ecosystem and new approaches to wellness." That means that the company will use these findings to further develop its technology further as a way to support the healthcare industry.

Each collaboration will address a different segment of healthcare; for example, the work Samsung is doing with the MIT Media Lab will explore new digital profiles for monitoring and improving sleep, while it's partnership with Brigham & Women’s Hospital will involve examining Galaxy Watch biometric data to see how resilience and frailty can build more effective, personalized pictures of individuals’ health.  

Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham and a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, has nearly 1,000 inpatient beds, approximately 50,000 inpatient stays, and over 2.6 million outpatient encounters annually.

“Through our work with Samsung, we are exploring how to put concepts like resilience and frailty into quantifiable terms and investigate how seemingly disparate physiologic systems affect each other,” Dr. Bruce Levy, Interim Chair, Department of Medicine and Chief, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, said in a statement.

“We aim to give people actionable insights to maximize their resilience from a stressor, leveraging wearable sensors technology, which offers a unique opportunity to map individual trajectories of recovery or deterioration.”

In the partnership with Tulane University School of Medicine, Samsung will also utilize the Galaxy Watch, this time using its BioActive sensor to monitor a range of cardiovascular disease indicators. 

Finally, with the Samsung Medical Center, Samsung is researching what it calls "multi-domain healthcare," with the aim of developing an integrated analysis data platform and advanced algorithms for abnormal symptom notification.

“This new collaboration will study new methods and systems spanning heart health, sleep and mindfulness utilizing personalized dashboards and dynamic, multi-domain platforms,” said Seung Woo Park, President and CEO, Samsung Medical Center.

“Leveraging both Samsung’s comprehensive services and wide operational capacity and Samsung Medical Center’s expertise and clinical research facilities, the partnership aims to develop an algorithm and build a platform to better monitor and give insights on users’ heart health, sleep, mental health and more.” 

The ultimate goal for Samsung is to take this research and apply it to its wearable technology.

In addition to these partnerships, Samsung earlier this year teamed up with Swedish birth control app Natural Cycles this week, bringing the company's temperature-based menstrual cycle tracking capabilities to the Galaxy Watch5 series. And last month the University of Michigan's Exercise & Sport Science Initiative announced a research partnership with Samsung Electronics on smartwatch technology. Together, the two companies are looking to help runners manage their health and physical activity, and to provide them with more reliable and accurate data.

“Around the world, innovation and transformational health research are being fostered by leading institutions in collaboration with Samsung,” Hon Pak, Vice President and Head of the Digital Health Team, MX Business at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement.

“In addition to our own deep investments in health research, we are sourcing exemplary, talented industry leaders to collaborate with. We are excited to be working with prestigious institutions to explore new health technologies and novel perspectives on wellness.” 

(Image source: samsung.com)