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Samsung wants to 'thingify' your BODY with Simband

Think Dick Tracey meets Trekkie

Samsung has taken the wraps off a reference design with the idea of “sensorising” the human body, and it's neither a wrist-phone nor a smartwatch.

Imagine, if you like, replacing “machines that go ping*” with wires or sensors communicating with a wristband, and you've got a start on its Simband concept.

As Samsung says, it's a reference design for a platform, rather than yet-another-Fitbits-knockoff: “Devices based on the Simband platform will be able to gather vital diagnostic information - from your heart rate to your skin’s electrical conductivity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Since it's a reference platform rather than a specific product, Samsung's page is providing only its own thought-bubbles about the possibilities of the product.

It's a little more forthcoming about the platform that would turn the collected data into something useful: SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions) “a data broker that will enable wearable devices like those based on Simband to upload information to the cloud. From there, developers can access the data and leverage it to create entirely new applications.”

Samsung's SAMI graphic

The company says SAMI's APIs let “sensor developers recruit data in the way they want”. Which is probably why the accompanying graphic is a wormhole of some kind. Or something.

"If your body could speak, what would it say?" is a persistent theme in the promos, which El Reg suspects will be too inviting for Internet meme-makers to resist.

The South Korean powerhouse is now seeking development partners to take Simband and SAMI and make them fly.

Samsung pays the obligatory nod to security for SAMI, which is such a relief. After all, it would be disappointing to think that the bugs that have plagued platforms like home automation, office buildings, and industrial control systems, were about to be loosed on health data, wouldn't it? ®

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