Samsung has revealed a brand new OLED display that could put the best smartwatches out of a job, and we’re not talking about telling the tine. Its Sensor OLED Display concept can provide you with key health metrics just by touching the screen.
Spotted by The Verge at the Display Week trade show in LA, the Sensor OLED Display can provide you with measurements for your heart rate, blood pressure and stress levels merely by placing your fingers on the screen. How? It measures the contraction and relaxation of blood vessels in the finger with light being reflected in different ways based on the state of the blood vessels. You only need to use one but Samsung says using a finger from each hand will increase the accuracy of the results.
This sounds like it could be a bit fiddly but luckily the display can recognize fingers from any point on the screen, not just a dedicated scanner. Even without the health benefits, this is a useful quality-of-life upgrade when you consider that there is far more screen to aim for on a phone or tablet than a watch and also helps prevent inaccuracies from misplacing your digits.
All of this information is gathered purely from the OLED screen itself, no added components are needed. While amazing, don’t expect this tech to make its way to your next phone. There’s no real way of measuring the accuracy of the readings so far, and it’s really early days for this technology. Still, Imagine having a setting on your phone that locks itself when it detects a certain stress level, that might be either infuriating or essential depending on your outlook.
