It's the age of open platforms. From Google's Project Tango to Autodesk's 3D printer, technology companies want developers to take their ideas and build upon them to improve the industry as a whole. And now Samsung is on-board with its new digital health initiative.

Samsung has unveiled the Samsung Digital Health Initiative at a San Francisco event today. It's both a hardware and software open platform from the company's Strategy and Innovation Center team. The initiative's goal is to "accelerate the development of advanced sensors, algorithms, and data collection and analysis". Sounds complex, right? It's not.

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The initiative currently involves a wearable wristband called Simband, but it's just a reference design or blueprint to show how other companies could make similar devices to track heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure. etc. The wristband, which Samsung demoed in San Francisco, uses an open software architecture called Sami to collect data from a variety of sources and display it in an attempt to educate consumers about their bodies.

“Samsung’s Digital Health Initiative provides an exciting opportunity for the brightest minds in the technology world to come together to develop the products that will, for the first time, put individuals in the driver’s seat in understanding their own health", said Young Sohn, an executive at Samsung Electronics, in a release. "Digital health is an incredibly important area for innovation. We believe this initiative is an essential first step".

Samsung’s Simband is capable of being designed in a modular way and can integrate the most advanced sensing technologies in the world. Samsung is hoping developers and innovators will use it to create their own advanced sensors, algorithms, and other technologies. The company clarified that the Simband would never be sold commercially. As for Sami, it allows devices and sensors to securely store data in the cloud.

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Both of these hardware and software components make up the initiative's open platform. Samsung not only showed off how they both work today but also announced an agreement with the University of California, San Francisco that could validate the health-focused technology and therefore help companies and entrepreneurs bring similarly innovative products to market in the near future.

"Simband-designed sensor technologies and algorithms and SAMI-based software will take individual understanding of the body to a new level – for the first time giving voice to a deeper understanding of personal health and wellness. In addition, through the development of new sensing technologies and software, it’s possible that entirely new and previously unimagined insights into health and wellness could be generated," explained Samsung in a release.

In other words, with Samsung's Digital Health Initiative, you can expect the people of tomorrow to sport better health-tracking gadgets.