Hello SmartThings community! There is one trend I saw in video clips from this year’s CES: more and more products targeting healthcare and fitness. Product vision and management in healthcare and fitness may require some diverse skills, so will SmartThings build a product team around these markets in the near future? Perhaps a new product manager in Palo Alto to bridge the gap between home automation and health data?
I’d be very grateful for any insights from @florianz on this!
SmartThings is a million miles away from even being qualified to do anything even remotely related to health care. It is both a small jump and huge leap from personal monitoring like a fitbit to a real health care product.
I see ST at least three years away from offering any kind of product qualifying as a Class I device. And unless they acquire a company or are bought, they will never be able to offer a Class II devices. The investment require to create a quality system, programmers, and organization culture with the discipline needed to design, build, and register a product would be too daunting for them. I doubt they have the stomach for it.
ST’s best bet is to limit themselves to personal monitoring products that are for entertainment purposes only.
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I agree with the sentiment of this as it applies to the current SmartThings unit. (I myself am quadriparetic, use a wheelchair with limited hand function, and so have some experience of actual in home medical systems.)
That said, Samsung does have divisions that build medical equipment, from imaging systems to health monitors. And they’ve said that part of the intent of the Sami project (cloud-based data integration) is for medical projects.
I do think it possible that at some point the SmartThings name will be associated with Samsung-manufactured medical equipment, or at least medical data services. But it will have to be done by divisions that have the resources you’ve mentioned. And have a very different delivery philosophy from the current SmartThings unit.
For example, as I’ve often mentioned, pushing out unscheduled product updates that take the in-home equipment off-line for anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours is just not acceptable for a medical smart home, even if the update goes perfectly. But again, I wouldn’t expect that from a unit that actually delivered class II equipment.
Samsung Health:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/healthcare/
SAMI announcement:
And for the OP, I suspect this is the most relevant Samsung business unit for you:
Samsung Digital Health unit:
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You are right. Samsung could certainly work within the healthcare division to incorporate some HA into consumer products and brand it as ST. They could probably do this today. If they did that to cross-promote the ST HA products and the the healthcare products, they would expose a lot more consumers to ST.
The question is, would they want to risk the reputation of the health care division through branding and association with ST as it is today? ST flies under the radar now, but that kind of a move and expansion would give ST more attention and interest than they probably want.
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That’s why I think it’s going to be so interesting to see what actually gets delivered for the SmartThings piece of the Samsung television rollout this year.
My guess, based on nothing at all, is that the TV version will be a very limited subset of what the hub can do, but will be reliable for that subset. Because otherwise, as you say, I can’t see them risking the Samsung brand for televisions on SmartThings.
If so, and it works, then that might well be a model for rollouts in other divisions in the future.
We’ll see. 
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Thank you all for posting this helpful information! I enjoyed our friendly exchange and wanted to add that I can only imagine how incredible it must be as a quadriparetic to find value in a non-medical product in the simple things like your keyboard, TV, bed or frig! I also have empathy, technical chops, am eager to learn and friendly
Thanks again. 
