Brigham and Women's, Samsung explore connection between digital wearables and wellness

Photo: Edwin Tan/Getty Images

Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a founding member of Mass General Brigham and a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is partnering with Samsung Medical Center in South Korea to research how digital wearables affect wellness.

Brigham and Women's will use Galaxy Watch biometric data to explore how clarifying the twin concepts of resilience and frailty can build a more effective, personalized picture of individuals' health, according to Samsung.
 
"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," said Dr. Bruce Levy, interim chair, Department of Medicine and chief, Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Brigham and 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."

Samsung Medical Center is also collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans to explore other enhancements to digital health. 

In collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, Samsung is exploring new digital profiles for monitoring and improving sleep.

"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 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."

In partnership with Tulane University School of Medicine, Samsung will use the Galaxy Watch's BioActive sensor to monitor a range of cardiovascular disease indicators.

"Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide," said Dr. Nassir Marrouche, principal investigator of the study and director of the Tulane Research Innovation for Arrhythmia Discovery at Tulane University School of Medicine. "By combining our extensive expertise in cardiovascular disease, Samsung's BioActive sensor technology and data-driven machine learning approaches, we aim to unlock a significant, latent body of data to help better predict who's at risk for hospitalization, get them treatment faster and ultimately improve health outcomes."

WHY THIS MATTERS

The research findings will inform future development of technology to support the healthcare industry and expand the understanding of individuals' minds and bodies to unlock the full wellness potential of personal devices, Samsung said.

Samsung said it hopes to discover new possibilities for wearables for enhanced health services.

THE LARGER TREND

Samsung Electronics is working closely with the Samsung Medical Center on these efforts.

Samsung was expected to give more details about the Open Innovation Initiative at the Samsung Developer Conference 2023 in San Francisco on October 5. 

Samsung's research includes developing an integrated analysis data platform and advanced algorithms for abnormal symptom notification.

In May, the Samsung Galaxy Watch received FDA clearance for AFib monitoring.

ON THE RECORD

"This new collaboration will study new methods and systems spanning heart health, sleep and mindfulness utilizing personalized dashboards and dynamic, multi-domain platforms," said Seung Woo Park, president and CEO of the Samsung Medical Center. "Leveraging both Samsung's comprehensive services and wide operational capacity and Samsung Medical Center's expertise and clinical research facilities, the partnership aims to develop an algorithm and build a platform to better monitor and give insights on users' heart health, sleep, mental health and more."
 
 

Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org