SEOUL, September 09 (AJP) - The smartwatch is no longer merely a supplement to a smartphone.
Samsung Electronics is pushing its latest Galaxy Watch deeper into preventive health care, seeking to turn a device once used mainly for checking messages and counting steps into an always-on health monitor capable of spotting changes before users themselves notice them.
The effort also puts Samsung in a more direct contest with Apple, which has steadily transformed the Apple Watch into a health platform with electrocardiograms, irregular heart rhythm alerts, sleep apnea detection and, more recently, notifications for signs of chronic hypertension.
Samsung on Wednesday held a press briefing in Seoul to highlight a suite of heart and health-monitoring functions built around its Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2, unveiled in July.
At the center of the latest upgrade is Heart Health Score, a Samsung Health feature that combines sleep, physical activity, body composition and vascular stress trends into a single assessment of factors affecting cardiovascular health.
Rather than simply displaying individual measurements, the feature is designed to tell users how their everyday habits may be influencing their long-term heart health and provide personalized guidance on what they could change.
Another new feature, Vitals, continuously looks for deviations from an individual's normal physiological patterns.
After a user wears the Galaxy Watch during sleep for at least seven nights, it establishes a personal baseline using five biometric signals — heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen saturation.
The watch can then flag measurements that move outside the user's normal range.
The concept illustrates the direction in which the wearable industry is moving. The competition is increasingly less about how many physiological measurements a watch can collect and more about whether software can convert those measurements into information that a user can understand and act upon.
Apple has been pursuing much the same approach.
Its Vitals app, introduced with watchOS 11 in 2024, also establishes a user's typical overnight ranges and can issue a notification when multiple metrics fall outside them. Apple monitors heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen where available and sleep duration.
Samsung's Vitals therefore represents less an entirely new category than an attempt to build a more comprehensive Samsung Health alternative around the same emerging idea of personalized baseline monitoring.
Where Samsung is trying to put more distance between itself and Apple is in what it can measure — and how those measurements are combined.
Galaxy Watch9's Heart Health Score incorporates factors including body composition, an area where Samsung has had a hardware advantage for several generations.
Galaxy Watches equipped with bioelectrical impedance analysis, or BIA, can estimate body fat, skeletal muscle, body water, body mass index and other body-composition indicators directly from the wrist. The measurements are intended for general wellness rather than medical diagnosis.
The information also feeds into Samsung's Fitness Index, which combines body composition, exercise records and other indicators to assess a user's fitness level and recommend goals.
Blood pressure provides an even clearer point of distinction.
Samsung's Galaxy Watch can estimate blood pressure after being calibrated against a conventional upper-arm cuff, with recalibration required every 28 days. The capability, previously limited by regulatory approval in some markets, became available to eligible U.S. Galaxy users in March this year.
The Galaxy Watch9 goes a step further with a blood-pressure trend feature that can provide an estimate of morning blood pressure after users wear the calibrated watch overnight.
Apple has taken a different route. Apple Watch Series 9 and later models and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later can analyze cardiovascular patterns over a 30-day period and warn users when the data suggest possible chronic hypertension.
The Apple feature does not provide a conventional systolic-and-diastolic blood-pressure reading. Users who receive a hypertension notification are instead advised to measure their blood pressure with a separate cuff for seven days and take the results to a medical professional.
Apple introduced the hypertension notification feature in South Korea in January this year.
The difference highlights two competing approaches to turning consumer electronics into health devices.
Samsung is placing more measurement tools directly on the wrist, while Apple has often focused on detecting longer-term patterns that may warrant further medical examination.
Neither approach turns a smartwatch into a doctor.
Samsung and Apple repeatedly caution that their watches are not substitutes for professional diagnosis or treatment, an increasingly important distinction as consumer devices move closer to areas traditionally occupied by medical equipment.
Choi Jong-min, vice president of Samsung Electronics' Digital Health Team, said continuous monitoring is one of the biggest advantages wearable devices can bring to preventive health care.
Samsung has been developing heart-monitoring technology for its wearable devices for more than a decade.
Its Gear 2 and Gear Fit, released in 2014, included optical photoplethysmography, or PPG, sensors for measuring heart rates. The company later added electrocardiogram measurement, blood-pressure monitoring and irregular heart rhythm notifications.
Its irregular heart rhythm notification, designed to identify rhythms suggestive of atrial fibrillation, has received clearance from both South Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Sleep has become another area where the two companies have steadily converged.
Samsung received the first FDA De Novo authorization for a smartwatch sleep apnea feature in 2024 and has upgraded the latest version to analyze breathing disruptions during sleep using artificial intelligence.
Apple introduced its own sleep apnea notifications later in 2024. Its system uses the accelerometer to detect small wrist movements associated with breathing disturbances and evaluates the pattern over 30 days before alerting users to possible moderate-to-severe sleep apnea.
Apple's sleep apnea notification became available in South Korea in September 2025, meaning both companies now compete over many of the same medically sensitive functions in Samsung's home market.
For Samsung, however, the objective is increasingly to connect those individual functions into something closer to an early-warning system.
The company cited cases in which alerts from Galaxy Watches prompted users to seek medical help.
One user in Jordan received repeated irregular heart rhythm notifications and later sought medical attention, leading to the discovery of atrial fibrillation, according to Choi.
Another user in Brazil recorded an electrocardiogram after noticing an abnormal heartbeat and shared the result with a doctor before receiving treatment.
"The most important thing is that these people were able to detect the signs before reaching a critical moment and receive treatment in time," Choi said.
Samsung is also trying to extend that monitoring beyond the person wearing the device.
Samsung Health allows users to share information such as heart rate, stress, blood oxygen, sleep and body composition with family members, allowing relatives to follow changes remotely.
Samsung said the capability could be particularly useful for families monitoring elderly parents who live alone or apart.
Samsung views the Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watch as complementary rather than competing form factors, with the lighter ring suited to continuous and overnight monitoring and the watch offering a display, exercise functions and broader interaction.
When both are used, health information is brought together through Samsung Health. Users can also alternate between the devices while charging them, reducing gaps in monitoring, while Samsung says wearing both can extend the Ring's battery life by up to 30 percent by allowing the Watch to take over some overlapping measurements.
When asked how Galaxy Watch differentiates itself from smart rings such as Oura Ring in markets including the United States, Choi said the two form factors serve somewhat different purposes.
He characterized rings as more lifestyle-oriented devices, while watches offer broader functionality, particularly for sports and exercise, on top of health monitoring.
The strategy gives Samsung something Apple does not yet have — a first-party ring feeding data into the same health ecosystem as its smartphone and watch.
But Samsung still has considerable ground to defend in the smartwatch market.
Apple, despite slipping behind Huawei globally in the second quarter, still accounted for 20 percent of worldwide smartwatch shipments and recorded the fastest year-on-year growth among the five largest brands, according to Counterpoint Research.
The pressure is particularly visible in North America, an important premium market. Apple smartwatch shipments there rose 13 percent from a year earlier in the second quarter, while Samsung's fell 13 percent.
AJP Takeaways
- Samsung is expanding Galaxy Watch beyond fitness tracking with Heart Health Score and continuous monitoring features aimed at preventive health management.
- The company's wearable health push builds on more than a decade of heart-monitoring technology, ranging from PPG sensors to ECG and irregular heart rhythm notifications.
- Samsung sees Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring as complementary devices as it seeks to strengthen its health ecosystem and compete across different wearable form factors overseas.
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