Samsung is working on an advanced continuous blood pressure monitor for a future smartwatch.
A future Samsung Galaxy Watch could contain a blood pressure monitor that’ll discern when you’ve been exercising, drinking alcohol, or holding your breath.
While the Galaxy Watch 7 just arrived without the long-tipped blood pressure monitor built-in, Samsung thinks of the feature as a holy grail for its wearables.
Now, a recently updated patent filing has shown the work Samsung is doing behind the scenes to ensure a remarkably capable BP monitor when the hardware is ready.
The USPTO filing, Samsung showcases how it will detect various activities and states, based on how the blood pressure reading is affected compared to baseline readings.
Samsung explains that exercise, alcohol consumption and the holding of breath have a blood pressure signature. There are uniquely identifiable effects on the various metrics that comprise a blood pressure reading; the cardiac output (CO) and systolic blood pressure (SPB), and the total peripheral resistance (TPR) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP)
Samsung writes: “in the case where a change mechanism of blood pressure is aerobic exercise, the CO and the SBP show a tendency of an increase compared to the stable stage, but the TPR and DPB show tendency of a decrease.
“Accordingly, in the case where blood pressure is estimated by combining the CO feature and the TPR feature, when a changing tendency is such that the CO feature increases sharply while the TPR feature decreases, the processor may determine a state of aerobic exercise and estimate the SBP as increasing somewhat sharply and estimate the DBP as increasing very slightly.”
As is almost always the case, the language is quite technical in these patent filings, but Samsung also explains the effects of holding breath on the blood pressure and how its sensors could detect it.
The filing reads: “In still another example, in the case where a changing mechanism of blood pressure is breath-holding, and blood pressure is estimated by combining the CO feature and the TPR feature, when the TPR feature increases and CO feature is maintained at the same level, both the SBP and the DBP are proportional to the result of the combination.”
Samsung has been dutifully working around creating building a blood pressure monitoring tool within its Galaxy Watch models for quite some time now.
In an interview in January, Hon Pak, who runs the mobile digital health division said:
“If we can do continuous blood pressure and glucose, we’re in a whole different ballgame. I think that’s where everyone is trying to get to,” they said.
“We are looking at everything from miniaturization to the various different technology platforms that can do some type of glucose monitoring or anything in between.”
Samsung has filed plenty of intellectual property filings to showcase its work on achieving the aims, and we regularly see those patents updated.
Whether Samsung is able to achieve these lofty goals in time for the Galaxy Watch 8 or second generation Galaxy Watch Ultra a year from now remains to be seen.
