ICT News South Africa

Samsung reveals innovations for improving consumer lifestyles

New Samsung platforms and developer tools provide expansive opportunities for developers in Digital Health, Smart Home, Wearables and Virtual Reality.

Top developers from around the world gathered recently as Samsung Electronics announced new platforms and opportunities aimed at innovations for enhancing consumer lifestyles through open collaboration.

"Our news highlights the exciting developments occurring at Samsung and its growing ecosystem of developers and partners, across a wide range of technologies," said Matthew Thackrah, Deputy MD of Samsung Electronics SA. "We remain committed to enabling developers to create innovative solutions that ultimately improve consumer lifestyles."

Unveiled at the conference were new software tools and developments aimed at advancements in digital health, smart home, wearables and virtual reality.

Digital Health

Samsung is dedicated to helping create and accelerate a wider digital health movement.

To support this effort, the company announced:

  • Samsung Digital Health (SDH) Platform and SDK: SDH SDK provides developers a feature to track information on personal health, such as activity, workout, food consumption and more. In addition, it syncs the information with Samsung Cloud server and Samsung Account. It allows services and apps to be connected to the SDH Platform, on which users can enjoy quality health-care services from Samsung's partners in the health-care industry;
  • Samsung Simband open reference design platform is now available to be ordered by developers wishing to design sensors and algorithms based on the platform. Simband is an open hardware reference design for wearable technology, capable of integrating the most advanced sensing technologies in the world;
  • Availability of an SDK for Samsung SAMIIO, a cloud-based open-software platform capable of bringing together fragmented data from a variety of sources for analysis;
  • Samsung's new bio processor, which enables device makers easily to add health monitoring to their next-generation smart wearables; and
  • Samsung is expanding its domain from personal wellness to preventive health-care service by building relationships in the medical, insurance and healthcare service provider industries.

    Smart Home

    Samsung continues to expand its vision for the Smart Home, through its own initiatives with Samsung Smart Home and through SmartThings. The Samsung Smart Home platform is designed to deliver smart home experiences that enable new kinds of conveniences for consumers. Development tools, such as the beta release of the Smart Home SDK, allow customers who have appliances developed by the SDK to control them by using a Samsung Smart TV or smartphone.

    The new SmartThings IDE, expands upon this effort by integrating with some of Samsung's most popular appliances and is intended to spur an open smart home ecosystem of products and experiences, resulting in platform comprehensive Smart Home.

    Wearables and Virtual Reality (VR)

    As a leading innovator in wearable technology, Samsung will continue to diversify its portfolio to deliver new, compelling experiences for consumers. It also aims to widen the ecosystem for these devices through developer support across a range of wearable and VR devices:

  • The Gear S SDK enables developers to create exciting, unique applications that harness network and location data by capitalising on the cellular functions, richer notifications and advanced UI of the device; and
  • The Gear VR Innovator Edition, powered by Oculus, merges the long-term expertise in gaming, developer community relations and virtual reality technology for a completely new mobile virtual reality experience.

    "Together, Oculus and Samsung have created an entirely unique product with the Gear VR Innovator Edition," said Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus. "It's still very early days for virtual reality as a new technology and medium, and we can't wait to see what the community creates and shares with the world on this new platform."

    Also, during the conference, were many sessions that introduced developers to new development tools, including the Tizen-based Samsung TV SDK, multi-screening gaming platform and EDU SDK, among others.

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