- Samsung Galaxy Watch users will receive a completely redesigned health app with new features
- These new features include Vitals, Cardio Load, and a dedicated heart health score.
- The app is now AI-first and is designed to turn Galaxy watches into ‘AI-powered health companions’
Samsung Galaxy Watch and Samsung Galaxy Ring users will see big changes to the Samsung Health app. Dubbed “a new experience” in Samsung’s press materials, the redesigned health app includes new AI-powered metrics and summaries to break it all down.
Samsung says the new app “uses AI to translate daily and nightly biometric data into personalized health guidance, helping users better understand everything from recovery and heart health to training load and overall well-being.”
This sounds familiar to me. Fitbit also recently underwent a complete AI-focused redesign, including a name change to Google Health. It hasn’t all been rosy, as many Fitbit users intensely dislike the forced pivot to AI, and what was Fitbit Premium now revolves entirely around its new Google Health Coach AI tool.
Samsung Health already uses AI in the background, such as machine learning, to calculate statistics like your energy score, but this redesigned app is also putting generative AI at the forefront. The timing of this move is likely to spark widespread anger among Samsung users.
Don’t panic, Samsung users
Fortunately, it’s not as bad as all that, despite Samsung’s redesign of similar AI apps and messages, so Galaxy Watch users can put down their pitchforks (for now). For one thing, Samsung hasn’t introduced a paywall on Samsung Health; Otherwise, there would be riots in the streets.
Secondly, if you look closer, the redesign is also a little less drastic than Google’s: instead of being completely oriented around an AI chatbot, as Google Health decided to do, Samsung decided to use GenAI to summarize and explain its metrics, adding new ones so that the user can delve into different aspects of their health in more detail.
I have listed all the new metrics below. Existing tools like Samsung’s Sleep Score, Energy Score, and Antioxidant Index remain, and Samsung hasn’t announced it’s removing any features, again unlike Fitbit and Google, which removed features like Badges and Challenges.
I have listed all the new features below. Each of these features will get contextual AI summaries, explaining what the numbers mean and, where necessary, how to improve them.
- Vital parts: Similar to the Apple Health feature, Vitals They analyze “five key biological signals during the night (heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen) compared to their true resting baseline.” Basically, Samsung will notify you if one or more of these metrics are abnormal, indicating that you might be getting sick.
- Heart Health Score: Combining Samsung’s vascular load metric with the body composition features of its watches, which can measure muscle and fat in the same way as the best smart scales. If you have a low vascular load and a body fat percentage within the range, your heart health score is likely good.
- Daily cardiovascular load: Accumulated tension based on recent cardiovascular exercise, such as running and cycling. It will contribute to your energy score.
- Fitness index: A radar chart of five different metrics (strength, flexibility, endurance, cardio, body composition). Strangest thing so far: How Samsung intends to accurately measure flexibility with a Galaxy Watch remains a mystery to me. I contacted Samsung to clarify this.
The timing of this update is certainly interesting: reports recently surfaced about a Samsung Galaxy Fit 4 that, when combined with this AI-powered Samsung Health update, would become a real Google Fitbit Air contender.
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