Whatever happened to Samsung's Simband? Fast Company has a deep dive today on the story behind Samsung's Simband wearable and SAMI platform, which were announced in a big way back in 2014 but aren't yet available commercially. The article tells the story of how Samsung rushed the program to launch in an effort to pre-empt the Apple Watch, then largely backed off the project once it became clear...
Cupertino, California-based Sensifree, which develops contact-free, electromagnetic sensors for continuously sensing heart rate and other biometrics, has raised $5 million in its first round of funding led by TransLink Capital. Other backers included UMC Capital, which is a subsidiary of United Microelectronics, and an undisclosed strategic investor. TransLink was one of the first firms to invest...
Misfit, formerly Misfit Wearables, the maker of the jewelry-like Shine activity tracker, has partnered with smartwatch-maker Pebble to integrate its algorithms into that company's device. According to a Misfit spokesperson, the deal marks the deepest integration to date for Misfit, which also plans to make an open API available to partners in the future.
The Misfit Pebble app, which runs on the...
On Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quietly updated its list of mobile medical applications that it would not regulate. It added a description of an app that fairly well describes Apple's recently announced Health app. The addition comes just a day after the FDA responded to a three-month old Freedom of Information Act request from a tech publication about its meeting with Apple...
Google Now tracking activity.
First it was Samsung's SAMI, then Apple's HealthKit. Now Google is, according to a report from Forbes, preparing to launch its own software platform for aggregating fitness and health data.
According to Forbes, Google will follow Apple's leads and announce Google Fit at its own developer conference, Google I/O, June 25 and 26. The software will aggregate data...
Where are the HealthKit skeptics? Apple didn't provide a whole lot of meat during its three-minute introduction to its health data aggregation platform, HealthKit, and its consumer-facing companion app, Health. Still, I would have expected more skeptics to come out with a better case against HealthKit's prospects. So far they have mostly just been the expected but weak comparisons to untethered...
One week before Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, where the company is widely expected to announce its rumored Healthbook app, Samsung hosted an event called Voice of the Body in San Francisco to show off a couple of digital health projects.
The two new digital health projects included Simband, an "investigational device" -- not a product -- that is stocked with a variety of health sensors...
