Samsung launches Open Innovation Initiative with leading universities and academic hospitals to build digital health ecosystem

Samsung announced a new Open Innovation Initiative to explore enhancements to the digital health ecosystem and new approaches to wellness.

Launched in partnership with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Tulane University School of Medicine and Samsung Medical Center - the company will strive to develop its technology further to support the healthcare industry, expand understanding of individuals' minds and bodies and unlock the full wellness potential of personal devices.

What will they do?

Here's how Samsung will engage with its partners:

• Improving sleep: In collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, Samsung aims to explore new digital profiles for monitoring and improving sleep.
• Quantifying resilience and frailty: By examining Galaxy Watch biometric data, Samsung will work with Brigham & Women's Hospital to explore how clarifying the twin concepts of resilience and frailty can build more effective, personalized pictures of individuals' health.
• Confronting cardiovascular disease: In partnership with Tulane University School of Medicine, Samsung will utilize the Galaxy Watch's BioActive sensor to monitor a range of cardiovascular disease indicators.
• Multi-domain approaches to healthcare: Working closely with the Samsung Medical Center, Samsung is researching multi-domain healthcare with the aim of developing an integrated analysis data platform and advanced algorithms for abnormal symptom notification.

Through these efforts, Samsung hopes to discover new possibilities for wearables in digital health and deliver diverse and enhanced health services for users and beyond.

On the record

"Around the world, innovation and transformational health research are being fostered by leading institutions in collaboration with Samsung," said Hon Pak, Vice President and Head of the Digital Health Team, MX Business at Samsung Electronics. "In addition to our own deep investments in health research, we are sourcing exemplary, talented industry leaders to collaborate with. We are excited to be working with prestigious institutions to explore new health technologies and novel perspectives on wellness."

"There's an ever-growing understanding of how poor sleep negatively impacts both individuals and society at large. Wearable sleep tracking solutions may provide many potential offerings to improve our sleep in the future," said the MIT Media Lab Professor Pattie Maes, who is also a principal investigator on 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."

"Through our work with Samsung, we are exploring how to put concepts like resilience and frailty into quantifiable terms and investigate how seemingly disparate physiologic systems affect each other," added Dr. Bruce Levy, Interim Chair, Department of Medicine and Chief, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital. "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."