Samsung Electronics Co unveiled a prototype heath-monitoring wristband connected to a cloud-based service, which would allow consumers to share their statistics with developers of new mobile fitness applications.
The company demonstrated its “Simband,” which can measure health indicators like heart rate and blood pressure, at an event on Wednesday in San Francisco. The Internet-based data platform is designed to promote consumer wellness and create a pool of information for digital-health researchers, the Suwon, South Korea-based company said.
“This is the beginning of our journey, the beginning of our platform,” Samsung president and chief strategy officer of device solutions Young Sohn said. “What we need is a community of developers and disruptive technology players to work with us.”
Samsung, dominant in the maturing smartphone market, is now seeking to broaden its technology in wearable devices and is racing to put its stake in the ground in other new consumer technology areas like digital health.
Global sales of smartwatches, glasses and medical products were about US$10 billion last year and are forecast to triple by 2018, according to researcher IHS.
The wristband hardware platform would be open to other manufacturers to develop their own products, in the same way that chipmaker Intel Corp and software maker Microsoft Corp provided components to companies like Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc in the PC industry.
Samsung said it also would create a US$50 million fund to support third-party development for the device.
“The smartphone business is clearly slowing, so they are looking for new areas of growth,” Mark Newman, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “As the world continues to age and there [are] not enough doctors to go around, we are going to increasingly rely on personal health gadgets.”
On the software side, a cloud data service called Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions is to be a repository for information that consumers could opt to share with mobile app developers, and which could deliver software that recommends exercise regimes or diets, among other services.
Samsung rose 1.9 percent to 1,460,000 won in Seoul trading yesterday. The stock has gained 6.4 percent this year, while the benchmark KOSPI is unchanged.
Samsung did not say how much the Simband is to cost or when it might be available to manufacturers.
ADVANCED: Previously, Taiwanese chip companies were restricted from building overseas fabs with technology less than two generations behind domestic factories Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp, would no longer be restricted from investing in next-generation 2-nanometer chip production in the US, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. However, the ministry added that the world’s biggest contract chipmaker would not be making any reckless decisions, given the weight of its up to US$30 billion investment. To safeguard Taiwan’s chip technology advantages, the government has barred local chipmakers from making chips using more advanced technologies at their overseas factories, in China particularly. Chipmakers were previously only allowed to produce chips using less advanced technologies, specifically
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Nvidia believes that AI would fuel a new industrial revolution and would ‘do whatever we can’ to guide US AI policy, CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia Corp cofounder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Tuesday said he is ready to meet US president-elect Donald Trump and offer his help to the incoming administration. “I’d be delighted to go see him and congratulate him, and do whatever we can to make this administration succeed,” Huang said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, adding that he has not been invited to visit Trump’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida yet. As head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Huang has an opportunity to help steer the administration’s artificial intelligence (AI) policy at a moment of rapid change.
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS