Samsung announced that it has begun mass production of a new all-in-one advanced chip called the Bio-Processor for the health-oriented wearables market.
The Bio-Processor is capable of measuring five key health attributes: body fat, skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, skin temperature, and stress level.
“With improvements in smart, fitness devices and an increase in consumer health consciousness, more and more people are looking for ways to monitor various personal bio-data, or fitness data, to constantly manage their health” said Ben K. Hur, Vice President of marketing, System LSI business at Samsung Electronics.
“Samsung’s Bio-Processor, which can process five different biometric signals, is the most versatile health and fitness monitoring chip available on the market today and is expected to open up many new health-based service options for our customers.”
The chip is able to process the bio-signals it measures without the need of any external processing parts.
Samsung managed to integrate Analog Front Ends (AFE), a microcontroller unit (MCU), a power management integrated circuit (PMIC), a digital signal processor (DSP), and eFlash memory into the industry’s first ‘all-in-one’ health solution chip.
The company said:
“While heart rate monitoring alone may have been compelling in the past, the ability to measure a variety of fitness data is expected in today’s wearable products.
“To meet such demands, Samsung has designed its Bio-Processor to integrate five AFEs including bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), photoplethysmogram (PPG), electrocardiogram (ECG), skin temperature, and galvanic skin response (GSR) into a single chip solution that measures body fat, and skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, heart rhythm, skin temperature and stress level, respectively.
“In addition, combinations of these fitness inputs can be considered for a variety of new use cases.”
It is possible that the Bio-Processor will be featured in a Samsung wearable at some point, but the chip could also be implemented in other products as well.
Samsung added:
“To speed product development and better understand Samsung’s new Bio-Processor, several wearable reference platforms are now available to demonstrate various uses cases. For example, wrist band, board and patch type reference devices exhibit the Bio-Processor’s potential by demonstrating its ability to measure multiple fitness variables on an extremely small device.”
Mass production of the Bio-Processor has already begun and Samsung expects it to be available in fitness/health devices within the first half of 2016.