Samsung Strikes Hospital Partnerships for Digital Health Research

Samsung Electronics is partnering with several healthcare organizations, including Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Tulane University School of Medicine, to conduct research into the use of smartwatches and algorithms in healthcare.

The technology giant announced the Open Innovation Initiative on Oct. 6 at the Samsung Developer Conference 2023 in San Francisco. The initiative is based on collaborations with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and Samsung Medical Center, in addition to Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Tulane University School of Medicine.

Samsung also plans to use the research findings to develop its technology in ways that support the healthcare industry and enhance individuals’ understanding of their health and well-being.

“In addition to our own deep investments in health research, we are sourcing exemplary, talented industry leaders to collaborate with,” said Hon Pak, vice president and head of the digital health team at MX Business at Samsung Electronics, in the press release. “We are excited to be working with prestigious institutions to explore new health technologies and novel perspectives on wellness.”

The company’s collaboration with MIT Media Lab will focus on monitoring and improving sleep. They will use the Samsung Galaxy Watch smartwatch to examine unique sleep profiles to personalize sleep interventions and identify improved sleep regularity, homeostasis, and circadian rhythm models, MIT Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes, PhD, explained in the press release.

With Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Samsung plans to explore the concepts of resilience and frailty and how quantifying them could help provide more personalized insights into health. The organizations will use biometric data from Galaxy Watch to conduct this research.

“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,” said Bruce Levy, MD, interim chair of the department of medicine and chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, in the press release.

Tulane University School of Medicine and Samsung will leverage the Galaxy Watch’s BioActive sensor and machine-learning approaches to monitor various cardiovascular disease indicators. Their goal is to predict hospitalization risk to improve the timeliness of care.

Finally, Samsung Medical Center, a hospital in South Korea, and Samsung will work to develop an integrated analysis data platform and advanced algorithms for abnormal symptom notification across various clinical conditions.

The organizations 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 of Samsung Medical Center, in the press release.

Samsung joins other technology giants in using its wearable devices to enhance healthcare delivery.

In September 2022, Google Cloud and Fitbit Health Solutions launched the Device Connect for Fitbit solution, which gives healthcare organizations access to consenting patients’ wearable data through the Fitbit Web API.

The data, including temperature, heart rate, oxygen levels, sleep, stress, and activity information, is filtered through a data connector for analytics via Google Cloud BigQuery, enabling health systems to build analytics dashboards and artificial intelligence models.