Samsung’s New Bio-Processor: Much Better Fitness Trackers?
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Samsung thinks it’s about time that fitness trackers did more than monitor your pulse. It announced today that it’s put into mass production a new chip that builds in support for measuring five attributes: body fat, skeletal muscle mass, heart rate, skin temperature, and stress level (although, “stress” appears to actually mean how sweaty you are). Samsung calls this chip the Bio-Processor, and fitness devices using it are supposed to start shipping in the first half of 2016.
Fitness trackers were, arguably, a lot more limited in 2015 than we had hoped. Early reports suggested that Apple planned to include many of these same sensors in the Apple Watch, though it ultimately ended up with just a heart-rate monitor. Samsung is clearly trying to take the next step before anyone else can. The question, of course, is whether the Bio-Processor can actually live up to Samsung’s claims. There are plenty of step trackers and heart-rate monitors out there that don’t do a very good job, so it’ll be critical to see how Samsung’s integrated sensors actually perform. A health monitor isn’t useful if its data isn’t any good.
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