Samsung’s S Health is a fitness app that is touted to have helped over 180 million persons who use the app globally keep track of their daily fitness data, speed, distance covered, heart rate and amount of burned calories as well as other health-related information. These functions have even been expanded further with the latest release of the S Health v.5.0, thus making the entire self-fitness routine more social, connecting people who help each other by way of motivation.
The Samsung S Health v.5.0 comes with improved user interface, streamlined to enhance user engagement. The main dashboard has been revamped and in its place, the app’s supported health activities are neatly organized under three tabs named; Me, Together and Discover, all geared towards helping users manage their fitness data well.
The “Together” tab is solely for social features, where users who desire extra motivation need to go to in order to achieve their goals. There are Challenges and Leaderboards which encourage them to encourage them to engage in healthy activities targeted at their fitness with friends. One of such chllenges is the Step Challenges which is a friendly one-on-one competiton and added to that, users can share their activity data on Facebook as a way of engaging more active group work out. The app supports 44 different activities such as exercise bike, step machine sessions, Pilates, lunges, crunches and squats as well as walking, running or cycling. The app automatically detects the activity being engaged in and regularly tracks the user’s progress.
Furthermore, there’s a Ask Experts feature which gives you access to a second opinion on a fitness program. This is actally a new feature on the S Health v.5.0 and it enables users connect and initiate Q&A sessions with dedicated healthcare professionals anytime and anywhere via text, phone, or a simple search.
The Ask Experts feature can help users find answers to nagging questions and get helpful advice from local professional health consultants in their country. Presently, this service is available in Samsung’s home country, Korea and will hopefully expand to other countries in the near future.
Also, important and dynamic contents like healthy living and workout tips, health information and relevant news can be found under the Discover tab whose content is geared towards helping users manage their health and stay motivated. The Discover tab’s health information board cover major topics such as fitness, weight loss, sleep, nutrition, recipes, cardio health and other vital aspects of healthy living.
Users won’t have to worry about the security of their biometrics and other data as the S Health service is backed by Samsung’s Knox defense-grade security platform which provides a higher level of protection and encryption with hardware-backed credential storage. The S Health app can detect malware, rooting binary and unauthorized changes on users’ phones with the Knox framework. When any security threat is detected, S Health will be rendered inaccessible.
Samsung Knox support is available on S Health v.5.0 or higher and is enabled on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and will be available on subsequent Galaxy smartphones. However S Health v.5.0 can be used on smartphones running on Android 4.4 Kitkat and higher.
Furthermore, S Health has also been vetted by an independent third-party firm to ensure it meet requirements in the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which is the federal regulations requiring stringent measures to keep protected health information (PHI) secure.