Samsung building 'digital health ecosystem' with universities, academic hospitals

The event kicked off with a keynote that was streamed live on YouTube, and among other things, Samsung revealed that is partnering with leading universities and academic hospitals to enhance its digital health ecosystem through collaborations with experts from those institutions.

The collaborations will include sharing of existing research between those institutions and Samsung and new research to understand how various aspects of a person's life can affect their health and better predict risk factors that can lead to serious diseases, such as those related to the heart.

Samsung's smartwatches, like those from other manufacturers, enable you to track your sleeping habits and offer advice on how to fix issues that can affect sleep quality. And through a partnership with the MIT Media Lab, Samsung wants 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.”

Samsung will also work with Harvard's Brigham & Women’s Hospital to gain insights on how it can help users develop higher resilience against things that stress them out in everyday life. And its partnership with Tulane University School of Medicine will see Samsung's BioActive sensor tech (the sensor that resides on the back of your Galaxy smartwatch) and machine learning being used to more deeply understand indicators of cardiovascular diseases.

As you woud expect, the data and research gained from these these partnerships will eventually be used to enhance the health and fitness tracking capabilities of Samsung's wearables, such as its smartwatches and the upcoming Galaxy smart ring, though it will likely be a while before we see any major breakthroughs or improvements.