Samsung has unveiled a slew of digital health and wellness projects it’s conducting alongside Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Tulane University School of Medicine and others.
Announced at the tech company’s Samsung Developer Conference 2023, the Open Innovation Initiative program uses smartwatches, clinical algorithms and other approaches to explore focus areas like frailty, cardiovascular disease and abnormal symptom notification.
Samsung said it plans to use the collaborations’ findings for future technology offerings geared toward the healthcare industry and personal health or wellness devices.
“In addition to our own deep investments in health research, we are sourcing exemplary, talented industry leaders to collaborate with,” Hon Pak, vice president and the head of the digital health team within Samsung’s mobile business, said in a release. “We are excited to be working with prestigious institutions to explore new health technologies and novel perspectives on wellness.”
The four partners and projects announced are as follows:
Mass General Brigham’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The provider will use biometric data collected by Galaxy Watches to explore “how to put concepts like resilience and frailty into quantifiable terms and investigate how seemingly disparate physiologic systems affect each other,” Bruce Levy, M.D., chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the 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,” he said.
Tulane University School of Medicine. The New Orleans-based institution will also be using the Galaxy Watch to anticipate when patients will likely require hospitalization for a cardiovascular issue.
“By combining our extensive expertise in cardiovascular disease, Samsung’s BioActive sensor technology and data-driven machine learning approaches, we aim to unlock a significant, latent body of data to help better predict who’s at risk for hospitalization, get them treatment faster and ultimately improve health outcomes,” Nassir Marrouche, M.D., director of the Tulane Research Innovation for Arrhythmia Discovery and the principal investigator of the study, said in a statement.
Samsung Medical Center. The South Korean hospital—which is backed by the Samsung Life Public Welfare Foundation, a nonprofit affiliated with the tech company—will be at the center of research into the development of “an integrated analysis data platform and advanced algorithms for abnormal symptom notification,” according to the announcement.
Seung Woo Park, president and CEO of the center, said in a statement that the work will help monitor and drive insights into users’ heart health, sleep, mental health and other areas of health.
MIT Media Lab. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research institution will be working with Samsung on developing “digital profiles” to be used with wearable technology to help monitor and improve sleep.
“Wearable sleep tracking solutions may provide many potential offerings to improve our sleep in the future,” said MIT Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes, a principal investigator for the collaboration. “We want to go beyond what is currently possible—to investigate more unique sleep profiles, to better personalize sleep interventions for users and to explore better models for sleep regularity, homeostasis and circadian rhythm.”