Source: Samsung
When it comes to your health, small changes can make a big difference. Every incremental improvement to your daily habits adds up to a healthier whole, and the upcoming Galaxy Watch will help build these habits even more effectively with a slate of new features to help you set up habits to improve sleep, heart health, fitness and nutrition.
What’s New
New features[1] include Bedtime Guidance[2], to help you optimise your sleep; Vascular Load[3], which measures stress on your vascular system while sleeping; Running Coach[4], to help strategize your training; and Antioxidant Index[5], to measure your carotenoids for healthy aging.
The new features are part of the One UI 8 Watch, which will be available on the newest Galaxy Watch series.
Why it Matters:
The goal of these new features is to help you build healthier daily habits, which can be challenging because they don’t develop instantly. It takes time to accumulate these behaviour patterns, and meaningful changes are often only apparent after a long period. But the rewards are worth it.
For example, eating unhealthy food may not immediately impact your health, but over time, it can have significant consequences.
Conversely, adopting healthy habits may not show immediate results, but over time, they lead to positive changes in your body and mind.
Samsung Health’s new features aim to help you develop healthy habits by motivating you through instant feedback on your health. These features inspire you to maintain your habits by providing rewards or warning signs and demonstrating immediate impact of your behaviours.
“Sleep remains a cornerstone of our approach to health, as it influences physical and mental well-being, social relationships and even work performance,” said Dr. Hon Pak, Senior Vice President and Head of Digital Health Team, Mobile eXperience, Samsung Electronics. “Now, we envision our Galaxy Watch delivering holistic insights centred around sleep—insights that lead to meaningful changes in daily life. We believe this aligns with our vision of empowering you to lead healthier lives through proactive care and holistic health management.”
Explore New Health Features
Samsung Health’s new features aim to help users develop healthy habits, using instant health feedback as a motivating tool.
Bedtime Guidance
A single night of restful sleep offers immediate health benefits, encouraging more proactive behavior changes and leading to a healthier tomorrow. This starts with a regular and optimal bedtime.
We constantly seek to advance our sleep-related tools, which include sleep pattern analysis, sleep coaching, and optimising sleep environments.
Now, we are providing additional tools to help you get better sleep by suggesting an optimal bedtime based on your lifestyle and sleep patterns while sending reminders to help you stick to it.
By analysing your past three days’ sleep patterns, the feature evaluates your need for sleep pressure and your circadian rhythm to calculate a bedtime that maximises alertness the next day.
This feature is particularly helpful for those trying to optimise their sleep after periods of irregular bedtimes. For example, if you go to bed later than planned over several days, or have inconsistent sleep schedules between weekdays and weekends, the bedtime guidance will consider these factors to ensure you get enough sleep.
Vascular Load
Sleep is a window into overall health, as it impacts holistic well-being. Galaxy Watch uses this opportunity to measure vascular load—the amount of stress on your vascular system while sleeping.
The vascular system carries blood throughout the body to deliver oxygen and nutrients and remove waste, making it a strong indicator to determine good heart health.
During sleep, stress on your vascular system should naturally dip; however, excessive fluctuations can negatively impact cardiovascular health.
Simply wear your Watch while sleeping, and it will measure your vascular load, providing insights into the stress on your vascular system[6]
Additionally, since all health factors are interconnected, the feature also provides insights into lifestyle factors such as sleep, exercise, and stress to help you maintain a healthier lifestyle and develop positive habits.
Running Coach
While sleep is a precious time to cultivate and care for your health, managing your health during active moments is equally important. Running is one of the most basic and universally available fitness activities, and Samsung has long sought to support runners, offering features to help everyone stay active and achieve their fitness goals.
Many runners face injuries due to over-pacing or are not optimally pushing themselves. Running Coach is designed to help runners safely complete marathons through optimised-intensity and injury-preventive training, making it ideal for beginners.
Our new Running Coach feature delivers motivation and real-time guidance, creating a unique training program based on your fitness level to help you achieve your goals.
Just wear your watch and run for 12 minutes; it will analyse your performance and running level from 1-10. You’ll receive a detailed training plan to help you complete a 5K, 10K, half marathon, or full marathon based on your level. Complete your training session, and you’ll level up and unlock your next running challenge.
Antioxidant Index
When taking a holistic approach to health, we naturally focus on ageing and inspiring healthy ageing.
However, behavioural factors, such as drinking alcohol, smoking, UV exposure, stress and lack of sleep, can accelerate aging by increasing free radicals in the body. These free radicals damage cells and accelerate aging. Antioxidants, nutrients found in many healthy foods, are molecules that neutralise these free radicals, helping prevent chronic illnesses and promote healthy ageing.
Use Galaxy Watch to measure carotenoids, which are antioxidants found in green and orange vegetables and fruits, stored in your skin.
Galaxy Watch employs an industry-first feature to measure carotenoids in just five seconds via its advanced, light-activated BioActive sensor.
These insights reflect behavioural changes. For example, drinking carrot juice can show changes in the index—providing motivation to adopt healthier habits.
Great health comes from the combination of many small changes—and with Galaxy Watch, it is now possible overnight.
[1]Samsung Health features are intended for general wellness and fitness purposes only. Not intended for use in detection, diagnosis, treatment of any medical condition or sleep disorder. The measurements are for your personal reference only. Please consult a medical professional for advice. Samsung account login required. Vascular Load, Running Coach and Antioxidant Index are available on Android phones (Android 10 or above) and requires the Samsung Health app (v6.30.2 or later). Vascular Load and Antioxidant index are Labs features that you can preview before its official launch. If you don’t want to use these experimental features, you can turn them off in Samsung Health settings.
[2]Bedtime guidance is available on Android phone (Android 11 and above) requires Samsung Health app (v6.30.2 or later). It is based on 3 days of sleep analysis of user’s circadian rhythm and sleep pressure.
[3]Service only available with Galaxy Watch Ultra or later released Galaxy Watch Series. To measure vascular load, it is required to wear Galaxy Watch when sleeping for at least 3 days out of recent 14 days.
[4]Service only available with Galaxy Watch Ultra or later released Galaxy Watch Series. To use running coach program, user needs to take a running level test and get a level before starting the coach program.
[5]Service only available with Galaxy Watch Ultra or later released Galaxy Watch Series. To measure, place the centre of your finger on the sensor at the back of the Watch and hold it for 5 seconds. While Anti-oxidant index can be measured using any finger, the thumb is recommended for the most accurate result. Repeat measurement due to uneven skin texture may lead to inaccurate results.
[6]Results available after three days wearing the watch