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Samsung’s new smart ring is part of a broader plan to put a “massive emphasis” on health technology, the company’s UK mobile director has said.
James Kitto said UK consumers are “telling us they want to take more control over their personal health” and “track it, monitor it” and then act on the data they see.
The Korean tech giant has just unveiled a range of new devices, including the Galaxy Ring, a smart ring with a seven-day battery life that can be paired with the wearer’s phone and smartwatch to help track health stats, including sleep monitoring.
It’s joined by two new smartwatches and Samsung’s latest generation of foldable smartphones – the Galaxy Z Flip6 and Fold6 – which have been equipped with the tech giant’s Galaxy AI tools for the first time.
“This launch is a result of our innovation and our desire to continue to drive innovation. It’s at the heart of what Samsung does,” said Mr Kitto, Head of Samsung’s Mobile Business Unit for the UK and Ireland.
He added that a key part of the company’s approach, helping it stand out in the crowded mobile technology market, was how it addressed consumers’ desire for more health tracking tools on a growing range of devices.
“At the core of these products is the ability to track outdoor activities, sports activities, workouts, as you would expect, as well as heart rate, fitness, step count, all of those types of activities, and then all of that data is integrated into an enhanced and ever-evolving Samsung Health,” he said.
“It’s the largest health platform in the Android ecosystem, period. We have millions of users in the UK, Europe and around the world, and it’s an incredible place to store your personal health data, but it’s really important to recognise that this is your health data, in your control, stored on your phone. Privacy and security are at the heart of that.”
The new Galaxy Ring, he said, would also help Samsung stand out as a device ecosystem, as the company could offer users a range of devices and health tracking capabilities that no one else can.
“Samsung Health is the app that really aggregates all of your health data and you can collect it from your phone, and you can augment it further with a smartwatch and a lot of our customers do that with a Galaxy smartwatch, which will add more detail and allow you to track your activities, your workout and get more detailed analysis of heart rate, sleep, etc.,” he said.
“And then you can of course take the Ring one step further. I call it the passive Ring: it’s like putting it on your finger and forgetting about it. It’s going to stay there and constantly track your health data, your heart rate, your body temperature changes, your skin temperature and of course, it’s going to track your sleep.
“I think the important feature is sleep tracking for when you don’t want to wear a smartwatch. I definitely don’t want to wear a smartwatch (to bed), so I charge it overnight and then the ring can take care of that monitoring overnight. So we have this passive tracking.
“Then you get much more active tracking with a smartwatch that also sends you notifications and lets you take calls on the go and so on.
“The benefit of having a Galaxy Ring in the Galaxy ecosystem is that all of that data is pushed to 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 in January introduced a suite of AI-powered tools, called Galaxy AI, that brings AI assistance to its flagship S24 phones: text translation and transcription, document summarization, sketch-based image generation, and photo editing, among others.
These tools have now been added to Samsung’s foldable devices, and Mr Kitto said this means all the new devices are smarter and therefore more useful.
“The common thread running through all the products is Galaxy AI and how these products work seamlessly with each other: how AI either powers the product itself or the data that you collect from those products and provides insights from that data using AI algorithms to help provide a personalized approach to health data,” he said.
“We pioneered the AI smartphone era. We led the way in the AI smartphone era, starting from zero AI users in January and now we’re at 3.2 million in the UK and growing at a rapid pace. So we believe we’re pioneers because we have an open and collaborative approach to building AI solutions.
“You will recognize that the pace of innovation in AI means you can’t do it alone. No entity, no matter how big or small, can decide to do this within the confines of its walled garden and claim to do it justice. You have to work with the best and that’s precisely what Galaxy AI is.”
“Samsung has built its own large language models (LLM), AI models and core models, but we are also working with Google and others to bring together a consumer-centric, consumer-oriented, tangible and beneficial AI use case in their daily lives.”