Many legacy hardware and software players are increasingly seeing value in entering the healthcare arena.
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Samsung announced last week that it is launching a fully integrated AI-powered personal health assistant for Samsung Health. Its mission is to provide cohesive AI driven insights for its users, bringing together unstructured and fragmented datasets across apps, devices and multiple services. Undoubtedly, the goal is to improve consumer healthcare access and knowledge, especially with how disjointed the device and service ecosystem in healthcare has become.
Over the last decade, for example, consumer use of wearables, especially for health metrics tracking, has increased exponentially. In fact, some reports indicate that nearly 60% of Americans now own or have at least one wearable, with over 83% stating that they wear a device more than 5 days a week. Moreover, with new and different form factors emerging, consumers have even more choices, ranging from rings and bracelets to glasses and watches. This in addition to an incredibly massive health data and tracking software and app market, which has grown significantly since the early days of the smartphone. While these tools have been profoundly useful for consumers, little has been done to unite all of these services and the data collected from them into one, cohesive arena.
Samsung’s goal is to start iterating on this exact problem: “health information is often fragmented across multiple devices, apps, and services, making it difficult for people to build a complete understanding of their overall wellness. While access to health data has never been greater, many users still struggle to interpret what their data means and understand how they can make meaningful changes in their lifestyle.” Therefore, the new Health Assistant platform has been built to collate information across datasets to help users bring these insights together.
Samsung itself has a massive ecosystem of devices and applications. For example, its watches are some of the most widely used devices across the globe, and can help users track activity, sleep, fitness and even maintain longitudinal data so they can be better informed when making healthcare decisions.
The growing presence of technology giants in the healthcare space is an emerging trend. Especially for companies such as Samsung, which have been historically known for other capabilities such as hardware and devices, the investment in software, especially for healthcare, is an exciting signal for the industry. Another prominent example of this phenomenon is Nvidia, which has also historically been known as primarily a hardware company. While hardware is still its bread and butter, the company is investing significant amounts of resources and cash into growing a wider healthcare ecosystem. From providing resources to developers in the healthcare space to partnering with other technology companies to advance open source models, improve healthcare robotics and simulation platforms, and innovate new ways to support drug discovery and development models, Nvidia is investing billions of dollars in healthcare technology.
The reality is that these companies foresee incredible value and opportunity in investing in the healthcare space and understand just how complex it is. This is also why companies like Google and Amazon have invested billions of dollars in healthcare as well, with the former doing a significant amount of work across the drug development, AI models and analytics fronts, and the latter going so far as to provide clinical care via OneMedical.
Solving the many problems that the healthcare industry has is a paramount necessity of the future. While no one player can potentially solve everything, as long as there are multiple players at least willing to try, there is hope for a better future ahead.