Health related tech has mostly been delegated to the wearables like smartwatches and bands, but these features rarely involve their screens as sensors. But it looks like Samsung turned an OLED screen into such a sensor, that is able to read things you’d expect from such wearables.
As The Verge reports, Samsung showcased its Sensor OLED Display during the Display Week trade show in Los Angeles. This sensor screen can detect fingerprints just about anywhere on its surface, which is something we can only hope smartphone screens can emulate. While that is already plenty impressive, it is also able to read your heart rate, blood pressure, and even stress levels, all via your fingers. While this can work with a single finger, you can use two fingers from both arms to get a more accurate reading.
The report notes that all the health sensing functionality is built directly into the Samsung Sensor OLED Display itself. So there’s no separate sensor the way phones currently implement their under-display fingerprint sensors. That being said, the report also says that the accuracy of these readings still remain to be seen. Ditto the time it takes for the health readings to be taken.
Worth noting that the Sensor OLED Display is being made by the Samsung Display division, which doesn’t produce consumer products. It would take the South Korean tech giant’s other divisions, like its consumer electronics division, to source these to be implemented into things we can buy. With that in mind, we should probably not count on any of these being implemented into a TV or phone that you can find on shelves anytime soon.
During the trade show, Samsung also showcased a range of other forms of flexible screens. Among them are the Rollable Flex screen, which “can be unrolled from 49mm to 254.4mm”, and a Flex In & Out screen for foldables that can be folded both ways.
(Source: Samsung.)
