Health and fitness is the current battleground that almost all smart watches are competing on, and while Apple will reportedly be going big on health sensorswith the Apple Watch 8, Samsung apparently has a new one of its own for the upcoming Galaxy Watch 5. ET News reports that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5will be the first in the line to contain a built-in thermometer for measuring skin temperature.
This feature isn’t exactly new in the world of wearables, with the Fitbit Senseoffering similar functionality. But Samsung has apparently been delaying adoption until the feature is reliable enough not to be influenced by external factors like ambient temperature, direct sunlight and the heat generated from working up a sweat. The company has now resolved this, according to the report, with technology to measure body temperature “as accurately as possible”.
Why would you want to measure body temperature? Well, a high temperature can be an indicator of sickness or even infectious disease, as recently proved to be the case with Covid-19. Indeed, some venues insisted on using a scanner to measure skin temperature as a requirement for entry.
And while coronavirus will hopefully have moved even further down the news agenda by the time the Galaxy Watch 5 emerges in the fall (August, according to the report), temperature can be used to introduce or enhance other health metrics, like menstrual cycle tracking or stress analysis.
