A partnership between Samsung Electronics and UC San Francisco has been announced to establish the UCSF-Samsung Center for Digital Health Innovation in order to accelerate the validation and commercialization of new sensors, algorithms, and digital health technologies for preventative health solutions.
Entrepreneurs and innovators will be able to make use of the test bed to validate their technologies in order to accelerate adoption of new preventative health solutions.
“Harnessing new preventative health technologies to help people live healthier lives is the next great opportunity of our generation,” said Young Sohn, president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. “We invite the world’s innovators and entrepreneurs to join us to validate their new sensors, analytics, and preventive health solutions in a world class setting. Samsung’s global Digital Health Innovation Lab initiative is aimed at enabling great new ideas to be tested, validated, and commercialized more quickly, thereby making lives better for millions of people around the world.”
The intention of the lab is to lend credibility to emerging technology in mobile health through systematic and rigorous validation. It is hoped that this would help new products reach their full potential and be able to reach widespread use among consumers and healthcare professionals.
In many ways, this arrangement moves towards establishing what may be the first clinical research organization in mobile health. An interesting note to make is that available information talks specifically about validation and testing – what is not clear is whether efficacy will be included here. For example, if someone develops a new heart rate variability monitor, will this center facilitate research to show us that the device has meaningful benefit in management of, say, heart failure or just that it accurately measures heart rate variability.
Michael Blum, MD, UCSF’s associate vice chancellor for Informatics, explains, “there are many new sensors and devices coming onto the market for consumers, but without medical validation, most of these will have limited impacts on health. Meanwhile, many practitioners also have creative ideas for new devices, but they lack the technological knowledge to fully develop them. This partnership will bring together these two very different worlds of expertise with the resources needed to accelerate new and disruptive technologies that will truly change lives.”
The UCSF-Samsung Center for Digital Health Innovation will be based on the UCSF Mission Bay campus where more than 50 bioscience startups, nine established pharmaceutical and biotech companies and ten venture capital firms are already based.
Source: UCSF
