The Role Of Ambient Smart Home Tracking

That ecosystem extends well beyond smartwatches. Samsung’s SmartThings platform already connects millions of homes worldwide, linking appliances, televisions, sensors and third-party devices. Pak sees those connected environments becoming an increasingly important source of health-related insight.

“If you leave the door of the refrigerator open or the stove is still on when you're leaving — these things are now able to be collected and used in specific ways,” he said.

For now, Samsung can recommend recipes, tailor meal suggestions and increasingly connect those recommendations to grocery delivery services. Soon, Samsung will be able to look inside its refrigerators to help you adjust a recipe to suit what’s there. And Pak believes the real value lies in removing the friction that prevents people from making healthier choices.

“One of the things that I've come to realise as a physician is that I can do a lot of things when someone is sick,” he said. “But the first-mile and the last-mile issues are pretty large.”

The first mile involves identifying potential health problems early. The last mile involves helping people actually follow through on the behavioural changes doctors recommend.

“A lot of people have difficulty with changing behaviors such as eating the right food, sleeping well,” Pak explained. “And so, this is where making the last mile easier to do is crucial. If I say you should measure your blood pressure, instead of just reminding them, you could have the button to say, ‘Click here and we'll take a blood pressure now.’ Part of the challenge is that there are barriers. What we aim to do is make it easier.”

Measuring Cardiovascular Risk With Samsung Health

One newly announced feature, for the Samsung Health app that uses the Galaxy Watch, is Vitals. This establishes a baseline for each user by monitoring heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels and other physiological signals during sleep over a seven-day period. Once that baseline is established, Samsung can identify meaningful deviations.

“We're able to then calibrate and see whether you're deviating from that norm,” Pak said. “If you go beyond a certain standard deviation, we alert you that there might be something you need to get checked out.”

Another upcoming feature for the Health app, Heart Health Score, seeks to quantify how lifestyle choices influence cardiovascular risk.

“For the first time, what we're doing is taking the measures of four pillars of wellness—sleep, nutrition, activity and stress,” Pak said. “We've been able to quantify how changes in sleep, whether you're active or not, those lifestyle choices, we can now correlate scientifically to the level of risk of your heart disease.”

The goal is to create a system that understands the individual behind the data.

“We're really looking for AI to help us take all the data that we're collecting and make it a daily health companion,” Pak told me. “It knows who you are, knows your preferences, and over time it will adjust the program and meet you where you are.”

The Power Of Continuous Wearable Data

The importance of continuous monitoring becomes obvious and Samsung’s answer includes measuring overnight blood pressure trends, sleep patterns and vital signs.

Pak mentioned a striking example involving a physician in Jordan who received repeated smartwatch notifications warning of atrial fibrillation.

“He was having a normal, healthy day,” Pak commented. “He went to see a doctor and that day had a stent and a procedure done to remove a blockage of the artery. He was asymptomatic the whole time.”

Stories like that illustrate why continuous monitoring matters, but Pak believes the future potential extends much further.

He cited research in which artificial intelligence analyzed thousands of sleep studies and found signals capable of predicting more than 30 diseases — years before diagnosis. Other analysis was able to look at individual organs and assign an age to them.

“What that tells us is that as we're measuring parameters on wearables and beyond, it's in there,” he said. “We just haven't done all the work yet.”

Custom AI Health Coaching On The Horizon

The challenge is persuading people to act on the data they collect, which is where Samsung’s next generation of AI coaching comes in. Pak said the company is aiming to launch this next year.

The ambition is to create an AI coach that understands not only a person's health profile but also their behavioral profile.

“We want to know how you behave,” he said. “There's a language by which I get motivated. There's a tone, there's a certain way in which I respond better, and everyone's different.”

“If I'm a drill sergeant and say, ‘Go do push-ups,’ somebody will respond to that. Most will not,” Pak explained.

Instead, Samsung plans to build systems that learn which nudges work for which people, adapting both timing and tone.

“Over the next two to three years, the AI will be able to say, based on this person's characteristics, I'm going to nudge them this way, and 70 or 80 per cent of the time I can predict that person is going to exercise more or sleep more.”

If that sounds ambitious, Pak said he believed the underlying data will eventually make it possible.

“There are a lot of signals that we're sitting on that we don't even know about,” Pak commented.

As wearable technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, the line between consumer electronics and medical devices is becoming blurred.

“What used to be clinical medical-grade features are now beginning to show up on the wearable side,” he said.

Samsung already offers regulated features such as sleep apnoea detection and atrial fibrillation monitoring in various markets, while continuing work on more advanced technologies, including non-invasive continuous glucose monitoring.

The technology is still evolving, and many of the answers remain to be discovered.

“We think there's enough out there that, through multimodal data collection and using AI, there are a lot of signals that we're sitting on,” he said. “We just have to go find them.”

Confirming The Next-Gen Galaxy Ring 2 Hardware

Samsung’s ambitions in health, however, are not only about software and algorithms. The hardware itself will continue to evolve — and Pak confirmed that a new generation of Galaxy Ring is already in development.

Asked about the future of the ring, which launched almost two years ago, Pak was careful not to reveal timing or specifications, but he did offer a clear indication of Samsung’s direction.

“We are working on the next generation. I can tell you that,” he said.

The company is looking at improvements in areas such as sensors and battery life, but Pak believes the biggest differentiator in the wearables market may not simply be the hardware inside the device.

“If you look at the comparison of other rings, regardless of the competitor, the sensors are not that different right now,” he said. “It’s really about what services you create on the top layer. It’s really the software differentiation that you see.”

“One device doesn’t cover all things,” Pak said. “Our approach is connected ecosystem, connected devices, that give people choices.”

One of the biggest questions surrounding the Galaxy Ring is whether Samsung will eventually expand its compatibility beyond Android. Today, the ring is tied to the Galaxy ecosystem, excluding iPhone users — a significant part of the global smartphone market.

When asked whether iOS compatibility was being considered, Pak was diplomatic. “I’m smiling but I can’t say anything,” he said. “I think you’ll be very pleased with some of the releases and the upcoming news.”

It was far from a formal announcement, but the implication was clear: Samsung is thinking beyond the current Galaxy Ring, and the next stage of its health strategy may be about reaching a wider audience.