Samsung Invests In Two Israeli Companies In One Week

By David Shamah, Times of Israel January 25, 2015 2 minutes

This article was first published on The Times of Israel and was re-posted with permission.

Korean tech giant Samsung will invest $10 million in Israel patient monitoring firm EarlySense, part of a $20 million financing round.

“EarlySense has developed and brought to market a unique, breakthrough technology that will improve the lives of consumers through health parameter sensing and monitoring,” said Gonzalo Martinez de Azagra, head of Samsung Ventures Israel, the company’s investment arm. “Our investment is evidence of our belief in the need to bring sensors to hundreds of millions of consumers and we will do all that is in our hands to contribute to EarlySense’s accelerated growth.”

In business since 2004, EarlySense developed a system that monitors patients who are sick enough to require continuous tracking, but are unwilling or do not need to be connected physically to monitors and sensors. Designed for use in non-emergency room or even home settings, the system uses sensors embedded into a mattress or chair cushion to monitor heartbeat, respiration rate, and movement. It operates on the theory that the more a patient moves around in bed, the healthier they are, in general.

EarlySense’s smart hospital bed.

The data is transferred to a monitoring station, either local or remote, with the system setting off alarms in the event that something appears amiss. The system is use in thousands of hospitals, nursing homes and home settings around the world, and according to hospital studies, over 90 percent of staff said that the system was useful in stemming and preventing patient deterioration.

For Samsung, the investment in EarlySense is about far more than healthcare. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier in January, Yoon Boo-keun, head of Samsung Electronics’ consumer products unit, said that the company was planning to more aggressively develop technology for Internet of Things. During his speech he specifically named EarlySense’s technology as one the company would be able to deploy for IoT products.

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Photos: Samsung