Fresh off adding new AI features to the Galaxy S24 earlier this year, Samsung is now adding AI to the Galaxy Watch, with Galaxy AI powering new customized insights and advice in the Samsung Health fitness tracking app. It’s all about actionable insights: the Galaxy AI Health app on Galaxy Watch takes the data your watch tracks and uses on-watch AI and the Samsung Health app to turn it into practical advice, from pointing out patterns that may prevent you from getting a good night’s rest to monitoring aerobic and anaerobic thresholds to help improve workout performance. Samsung isn’t the first to try to provide customized fitness advice – every fitness tracker touts the quality of its tracking and insights – but Galaxy AI combined with health tracking on Galaxy Watch may take fitness tech to the next level.
But what exactly does this new AI do? Here’s a feature breakdown:
- Easy to understand metrics, with a new Energy Score that provides an overall picture of your health based on sleep, activity, and heart rate. While you can still dive into the details, this breakdown will give you the big picture.
- Personalized advice with AI-powered insights based on your health data, as well as guidance and motivation to help you meet your health goals.
- New workouts, including personalized Workout Routine and Races that track your current and past performance for running and cycling.
- Improved sleep tracking with an updated sleep AI algorithm that will track movement during sleep, the time it takes to fall asleep, heart rate, and respiratory rate in addition to current sleep metrics. New Sleep Insights will give you a better idea of what these statistics mean, and help you build healthy sleep habits.
- More in-depth fitness metrics with a new Aerobic Threshold (AT) / Anaerobic Threshold (AnT) Heart Rate Zone for personalized training and help analyze your performance. And for cyclists, the watch will be able to calculate Functional Threshold Power (FTP) in just 10 minutes. This new data can help you train like a pro.
Read more: Sleep Problems? Your Samsung Watch Can Tell if It May Be Sleep Apnea
But it’s a race to see which tech company will make the best use of AI in its fitness devices because Samsung isn’t the only one trying to improve its health tech with AI. Just last month Google talked about “the transformative potential of AI in health,” with plans to build a Personal Health Large Language Model to analyze Fitbit data and provide wellness advice to users. Apple, too, is rumored to be working on AI-powered fitness coaching for Apple Watch.
While AI is often a tech buzzword, there’s a lot of potential for AI-powered health tools to help us understand – and more importantly act on – our health information. But we’re still waiting to see exactly how AI will change health tech: these Galaxy AI-powered fitness features will be available on the next Galaxy Watch lineup with One UI 6 Watch, which is due out later this year. For now, the feature list sounds promising and we can’t wait to see how Samsung’s latest health features work when they’re finally available.
[Image credit: Samsung]
Elizabeth Harper is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience covering consumer technology and entertainment. In addition to writing for Techlicious, she's Editorial Director of Blizzard Watch and is published on sites all over the web, including Time, CBS, Engadget, The Daily Dot and DealNews.
