Samsung’s new smart ring is part of a wider plan for its business to put a “massive focus” on health tech, the firm’s mobile boss in the UK has said.
James Kitto said UK consumers “are telling us they want to take more control of their personal health” and to “track it, monitor it” and then respond to the data they see.
The Korean tech giant has just unveiled a range of new devices, including the Galaxy Ring, a smart ring with seven days’ battery life which can be linked to the wearer’s phone and smartwatch to help track health stats, including sleep monitoring.
It is joined by two new smartwatches and the latest generation of Samsung’s foldable smartphones – the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Fold6 – which have been loaded with the tech giant’s Galaxy AI tools for the first time.
“This launch is powered by our innovation and our focus and determination to continue to drive innovation – it is absolutely at the heart of what Samsung is about,” Mr Kitto, Samsung’s UK and Ireland head of mobile, said.
He added that a key part of the company’s approach, helping it out stand out in the crowded mobile tech market, was the way it was meeting consumer desire for more health tracking tools across a growing range of devices.
“At the heart of these products is the ability to track outdoor activities, sports activities, workouts, as you’d expect, plus heart rate, fitness, step counts, all of those kinds of activities and then all this data is built into an improved and ever-evolving Samsung Health,” he said.
“This is the largest health platform on the Android ecosystem, full stop. We’ve got millions of users in the UK and across Europe and the globe, and it’s an incredible home for your personal health data, but it’s really important to recognise that this is your health data, under your control, kept on your phone. Privacy and security is at the heart of it.”
The new Galaxy Ring, he said, would also help Samsung stand out as a device ecosystem because the company could offer users a range of devices and health tracking capabilities that no one else can.
“Samsung Health is the application that really aggregates all of your health data and you can gather that from your phone, and you can augment that further with a smartwatch and many of our customers do so with a Galaxy smartwatch, which will add further detail and allow you to track your activities, your workout, and get more detailed analysis around heart rate, sleep etc,” he said.
“And then you can augment that further of course, with the Ring. I call the Ring passive – it’s very much put it on your finger and forget about it. It’s going to sit there and constantly track your health data, your heart rate, variations in body temperature, skin temperature, and of course its going to track sleep.
“I think the important feature there is tracking sleep when you don’t want to wear a smartwatch – I certainly don’t want to wear a smartwatch (to bed), so I’ll charge it up overnight and then the ring can take care of doing that monitoring overnight. So we have this passive tracking.
“Then you’ve got the much more active tracking from a smartwatch which is also giving you notifications and allowing you to take calls on the go and so on.
“The beauty of having a Galaxy Ring in the Galaxy ecosystem is that all of this data is fed into Samsung Health and Samsung Health can then choose which data point to use.”
Alongside these health tracking tools, Mr Kitto said it was the key technology of the moment – AI – that was also a crucial part of Samsung’s offering.
The phone maker introduced a suite of AI-powered tools in January, called Galaxy AI, which embedded AI assistance across its flagship S24 phones – translating and transcribing text, summarising documents, generating images based on sketches and editing photos, among other things.
These tools have now been added to Samsung’s foldables, and Mr Kitto said this meant all the new devices were smarter and therefore more helpful.
““The common thread across all of the products is Galaxy AI and how these products work seamlessly with each other – how AI is powering either the product itself or the data that you’re gathering from those products and providing insight from that data using AI algorithms to help deliver a personalised approach to health data,” he said.
“We have pioneered the era of the AI smartphone. We led the charge on the AI smartphone era from precisely zero AI users in January and we’re now at 3.2 million in the UK and growing at a rapid rate. So we feel we’re leading the way because we have an open and collaborative approach to building AI solutions.
“You’ll recognise that the pace of innovation in AI means that you can’t do this alone – no one entity, no matter how big they think they are, can decide to do this within the confines of their walled garden and assume to do it justice. You have to work with the best-of-breed and that’s precisely what Galaxy AI is.
“Samsung has built its own large language models (LLMs), it’s got its own AI models and foundation models, but we’re also working with the likes of Google and others to bring together a consumer-centric, consumer orientated, tangible and beneficial use case for AI in their everyday life.”