Simband, Samsung's health-focused wearable blueprint, has arrived

Samsung Simband
Just call it a reference

Samsung debuted its Simband wearable and SAMI platform back in May, but things finally got rolling this week at the company's 2014 developer conference.

The Samsung Simband is a wearable loaded with health sensors that collect data like your temperature, blood flow and EKG levels. While Samsung just introduced a slightly improved second generation of the device it's not actually intended for sale.

Rather the Simband is meant as a blueprint for other device makers who want to incorporate Samsung's tech and designs into their wearables, and to that end the company has just released its APIs and development kit into the wild.

That's the real news, and it means developers can finally get started making their own health apps for Simband devices.

Send it to the cloud

Samsung says Simband is "our concept of what a smart health device should be."

"Now, for the first time you will be able to ask specific wellness questions and get clear, insightful answers direct from the source: you," reads a Samsung site describing Simband and some other initiatives.

One of those is SAMI, or Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions, a cloud platform that will receive data from Simband devices and allow developers to leverage it with apps.

Here's a video describing some of what Simband's many sensors can do. With these tools now available to devs it could be only a matter of time before Simband really takes off. Of course, it already has plenty of competition.

Michael Rougeau

Michael Rougeau is a former freelance news writer for TechRadar. Studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Northeastern University, Michael has bylines at Kotaku, 1UP, G4, Complex Magazine, Digital Trends, GamesRadar, GameSpot, IFC, Animal New York, @Gamer, Inside the Magic, Comic Book Resources, Zap2It, TabTimes, GameZone, Cheat Code Central, Gameshark, Gameranx, The Industry, Debonair Mag, Kombo, and others.


Micheal also spent time as the Games Editor for Playboy.com, and was the managing editor at GameSpot before becoming an Animal Care Manager for Wags and Walks.