Would you turn over your wellness to Artificial Intelligence? Before you balk, hear me out. What if your watch could not only detect diseases and health issues before they arise but also communicate directly with our doctors to flag us for treatment? What if it could speak with the rest of your gadgets in real time, and optimize your environment so your bedroom was primed for your most restful sleep, keep your refrigerator full with the food your body actually needs and your home fitness equipment calibrated to give you the most effective workout for your energy level? What if, with the help of AI, your entire living environment could be so streamlined that you were immersed in the exact kind of wellness your body and mind needed at any given moment, without ever lifting a finger?
It sounds like science fiction, but those days may not be that far off. At least, not if Samsung has anything to do with it. Right now, the electronics company is investing heavily in its wearables sector to ensure that Samsung is at the forefront of the intersection of health and technology. And in 2025, that means a hefty dose of AI.
Wearable wellness technology like watches, rings and fitness tracking bands are not new. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t wear some sort of smart tracker today. But the thing that I’ve always found frustrating about wearable trackers is the data. Sure, you can see how many steps you’re taking, how many calories you’re eating, how restful your sleep is and sometimes even more specific metrics like your blood oxygen or glucose levels, but the real question remains: what should you do with all that data once you have it? What happens when you get a low score or a red alert? Without adequate knowledge of what these metrics actually mean and how they are really affecting your body, how can you know how to make a meaningful change that will actually improve your health? At best, they become a window into your body. At worst, they become a portal to anxiety and fixation, which many experts are now warning can lead to orthorexia, an unhealthy obsession with being healthy.
(Image credit: Samsung)
The Samsung Health app, when paired with the brand’s Galaxy watches, rings, and bands, tracks a staggering amount of metrics from your heart rate to biological age. Forthcoming updates will include even more, including the ability to measure carotenoids in your skin as a way to assess your body’s antioxidant content. But Samsung also understands that what you do with the data is just as important as having it, which is why they’ve introduced an innovative AI-supported coaching program.
Out of the four pillars of wellness (sleep, food, activity and mindfulness), the first metric to get the coaching treatment is sleep because, according to Dr. Hon Pak, MD, Head of the Digital Health Team, Mobile eXperience for Samsung, it’s the easiest to track through wearable technology (which relies on skin contact) and, well, aren’t we all obsessed with sleep right now? According to a study conducted by Samsung Health in partnership with the National Sleep Foundation, the amount of people actively tracking their sleep has increased 182 percent over the last two years. Why? Because it’s a commonly accepted truth that how you sleep has an impact on all other areas of your health and wellness.
Here’s how it works: the app tracks your sleep metrics for seven nights, including your sleep duration, efficiency (how often you wake up), consistency, how many full sleep cycles you achieve, and more. After the seven nights, you’re assigned a “sleep animal,” essentially an anthropomorphic characterization of your sleep quality. Achieve high marks on all metrics for great sleep? You’re an Unconcerned Lion. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Exhausted Sharks. About one third of people, and women especially, are Nervous Penguins, meaning they might be in bed for enough hours, but sleep efficiency is low—they wake up frequently throughout the night.
But sleep animals are more than just cute. They not only help to make your sleep patterns easier to understand but they also give you something to work toward—a sleep goal if you will. The objective, of course, is to be an Unconcerned Lion and the AI-driven sleep coach offers advice on how to get there based on your current sleep metrics.
About one third of people, and women especially, are Nervous Penguins, meaning they might be in bed for enough hours, but sleep efficiency is low—they wake up frequently throughout the night.
Right now, those tips are heavily in the sleep hygiene category, like decreasing the temperature of your bedroom, shutting off screens an hour before bed and others that we’ve surely all heard before (Samsung says they are developing more specific tips as well). But what is unique about the coaching program is that these tips change based on your sleep animal, so if you’re a Nervous Penguin one month and, say, a Cautious Deer another, you get different advice (it’s recommended to re-evaluate your sleep animal every month). The Samsung Health app also makes it clear how your sleep affects and is affected by other areas of your wellness with its ability to cross reference other metrics like food and caffeine consumption, activity levels, and daily energy scores. And most importantly, this coaching program actually works. Samsung’s data shows that by following the sleep coaching program, 94 percent of Exhausted Sharks were able to improve their sleep scores in just two months.
Of course, this also reveals the current issue with wellness-focused wearables: you are still the one who has to remember and commit to making the changes that are suggested. But wouldn’t it be great if one day, all of this could be done automatically?
A glimpse inside the Samsung exHome Concept House in Suwon, Korea answers this question and, let me tell you, it’s pretty damn cool. Powered by the Samsung SmartThings app, which links all Samsung Smart devices together from your watch to your refrigerator to your lights, your bedroom could be temperature controlled to your body’s ideal sleep temperature, the lights dimmed subtly to remind you to go to bed at a certain time, and blinds opened when it’s time to wake up. Your refrigerator could track not just what is inside and order more groceries by itself (through Instacart) but also see what you’ve been eating and suggest recipes rich in the macro and micronutrients you need that day. Your TV could double as a personal trainer using a 3D camera to monitor your form and take you through workouts chosen specifically for your day’s energy score. It could change your water and air filtration based on the environment outside, feed your dog automatically when you’re running late, and streamline your life in ways that, until now, we could only dream of. Many of these functionalities are already available with Samsung products, but the automation and intuition of AI is still being integrated.
The goal [is] to allow doctors real time access to their patient’s stats to help advise on potential issues at the first warning signs and offer more direct treatment.
Perhaps most importantly, given an aging population that increasingly relies on informal caregivers (a role that overwhelmingly falls to women), you can even link smart households together, allowing you to monitor the health and wellbeing of older relatives across a vast distance. Caregivers can get an alert if someone hasn’t woken up at their normal time, for instance, and robot vacuums can be used as roving cameras to see if someone has fallen and they can’t get up. Aside from wellness, an AI-driven smart home could actually have real medical implications.
Which brings us to the core of the tracking conversation: what is the endgame? Taking it upon yourself to track your wellness is obviously a positive, given the fact that only around three percent of medical spending in the United States is allocated to prevention, but what about when something needs more direct medical intervention? According to Dr. Pak, Samsung is working to streamline the conversation between medical professionals and their patients’ tracking data, the goal being to allow doctors real time access to their patient’s stats to help advise on potential issues at the first warning signs and offer more direct treatment.
Those days aren’t quite here yet, and health trackers will certainly never replace actual medical care (no matter what politicians like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might wrongfully claim), but with new capabilities rolling out at lightning speed, they could become an important part of our long term health and wellness strategies. For now, I’ll just listen to my sleep coach and remember to turn the lights off myself.
