The Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 isn’t set to be a regular old smartwatch, but “an AI-powered health companion.”
That’s not speculation, it’s from Samsung itself. The brand hasn’t unveiled its new wearable yet, but has given a massive tease as to what it’ll be like.
A big upgrade to Samsung Health means it’s going to understand your body better, and in the announcement of this tool, it mentioned how this change is “transforming the upcoming Galaxy Watch into a proactive, intelligent health partner.”
The brand’s not being secretive; new Samsung smartwatches are coming.
We’ve heard Galaxy Watch 9 leaks, which point to there being three models: the Watch 9, a Watch 9 Classic, and a premium Watch Ultra 2. The latter might even be 5G-connected. But this is the most overt reference Samsung itself has made to new devices.
Samsung hasn’t given any nods to its new wearables’ hardware. We don’t know how they’ll look or feel on the wrist, but we might know how they’ll run, thanks to the Samsung Health changes.
Thanks to these new features, we can extrapolate a few key tools of the new Galaxy Watch and get an early glimpse at them.
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AI is the name of the game
But is that name Bixby?
Samsung is one of the most gung-ho AI companies out there, and so it’s no surprise that Samsung Health is “a truly AI-powered health platform.” There’s no mention of whether Bixby is said AI.
Reading between the lines, AI comes to the fore with a new Energy Score, which Samsung Health provides as an aggregate of its “five core pillars: Sleep, Activity, Nutrition, Mindfulness, and Vitals.”
So, it’s a body battery score, like brands such as Garmin have been rocking for years.
In Samsung Health, this will provide you with health tips based on those five metrics to help you push yourself or stay healthy.
This sounds like a useful feature for a simple health overview on your phone, but a transformational one on your wrist.
A Galaxy Watch would, after all, be the one collecting those metrics and providing you with a convenient window into them.
I expect the Galaxy Watch 9 to make the Energy Score an important part of its user interface, putting it front and center as the core part of the user experience.
There’s precedence for this: the Apple Watch Activity Rings are a central part of Apple’s wearable UI, and it used to be the case with Fitbits before they went the way of the dodo.
Simplified health data is popular for some, to give you cursory details as to how your body is doing. But it’s not as useful for fitness buffs, who don’t find value in a boiled-down numerical score, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Watch Ultra 2 omitted it, or hid it in the interface a little.
Big upgrades for the Running Coach
Using the Cardio Load
Current Galaxy Watches, like many other health wearables, offer you running guidance to help you decide how far to go.
However, most of these tools, including Samsung’s Running Coach, are restricted by the factors they can draw on to make a decision.
Running Coach can create a training plan to help you reach certain goals over a long period of time, but it can’t adapt or amend exercises to cater for temporary factors.
Say one day you’re meant to be doing a 10k run as part of your training.
If you wake up a little tired, are worn down from previous runs, or, conversely, had a big pasta dinner the night before and have plenty of energy, Running Coach doesn’t have the ability to increase or decrease the load based on these factors.
A new Samsung Health feature does, though. Daily Cardio Load also takes into account “accumulated cardiovascular strain” and other fitness details to give you more nuanced suggestions. It can also give you rest times, so you know when not to be working out.
Another tool announced, Fitness Index, is designed to inform exercise routines, aggregating some of your data (and, intriguingly, comparing it to others’) to work out your strengths and weaknesses.
Over the years, I’ve seen countless smartwatches offer wrist-based running coaches to take you over a predetermined distance or help you push yourself in various ways. It seems that, to many countries, it’s a core fitness tracker feature.
However, I’ve yet to see it implemented in a way that truly takes into account the wider context of your health data. It looks like this is a problem Samsung is trying to solve with the Daily Cardio Load feature.
It follows that this could be an important feature on the Galaxy Watch 9. A more context-aware Running Coach would fix many of the problems the tool currently has, and make great use of all the metrics your smartwatch collects.
Sleep tracking upgrades
Collecting those ‘bio-signals’
As you read about earlier, sleep data is one of the five core pillars Samsung talks about.
While Samsung Health’s upgrades don’t point to any overhauls in how the Galaxy Watches track sleep, they do point to it being more in-depth.
In its section on Vitals, Samsung confirmed that its Health app will collect “five key overnight bio-signals,” these being your heart rate, the variation in your heart rate while you sleep, your rate of breathing, your skin temperature, and your blood oxygen level.
In the morning, it’ll analyze these figures and alert you if they fall outside your usuals.
You see where I’m going here. An app alone can’t monitor your skin temperature. This is a Galaxy Watch feature, as only a wrist-mounted wearable could collect those metrics.
Current Galaxy Watches will work, which is why Samsung’s Health overhaul occurred before its new Galaxy Watches are out.
But it seems likely that the new series of devices will be retooled to better collect this kind of data, with more sensors and a battery life that facilitates night-long tracking.
In other words, sleep tracking upgrades will likely be an important part of the Galaxy Watch 9 devices.
That’s nothing new for the brand, but after some missteps like the Galaxy Watch sleep score variance problems, the company still needs to iron out sleep tracking on its devices to make sure it really works.
