♨️ Good morning! Hot stuff coming through!
April 27, 2021
Foldable health
Eric Zeman / Android Authority
When I read the news that future Samsung foldable phones could get some serious health tracking features, I wasn’t exactly sure of what additional wellness features we might get. Sometimes, having more data that isn’t super accurate doesn’t really help.
But what Samsung is working on here looks serious:
- A patent awarded to Samsung, spotted by LetsGoDigital, shows that it’s developing tech using the non-flat surfaces of foldable phones.
- By quite literally folding the phone onto your finger, a bunch of interesting health data can be discerned.
It’s best described in this image:
- This is clever stuff! There’s a few different methods of data gathering shown here but undoubtedly the clamping-the-finger method to calculate blood pressure, along with elements claimed in the patents including vascular age, aortic pressure waveform, stress, fatigue levels, and more, is pretty interesting.
- There’s also a model where sensors are placed on the outside of the phone and the inside, where the phone will snap an image, convert pixel intensity into pulse wave amplitude, and gather health information using an amplitude conversion mode.
- And one other variant is using the palm of your hand — my medical knowledge gives out at some point as to where and which method is best, but that’s a good range of options.
- When are we getting these goodies? The patent game rarely yields those kinds of answers. Sometimes we see stuff that looks incredibly far in the future, where the company seems to be storing patents.
- With Samsung’s next Galaxy Z devices expected in July or so this year, I’d hazard a guess that the timing of this patent means the next foldables won’t include this health tracking. There’s a chance, but perhaps more like 2022?
- In case you forgot too, Samsung’s next smartwatch has long been tipped to get blood glucose monitoring sometime in the second half of this year.
Roundup
🍏 Also, a bug fixed in macOS 11.3 was one of the worst in a long time, already exploited in the wild and easy enough to do for malware (TechCrunch).
📺 Why the active-matrix LCD panel, despite largely being invented and developed by American companies in the 1970s, was never really manufactured in the United States (Tedium).
Chart Tuesday
- The Gemini 11 mission in 1966 (Wikipedia) is definitely one of the cooler missions among these.
- It also shows just how far away the Moon is, despite it lighting up our night sky so brilliantly, as it will tonight for a “pink” supermoon (The Guardian).
All the best,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor
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