This week the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Samsung that reveals that future Samsung portable and mobile devices may be used to monitor various parameters of an object, for example, state variables such as heart rate and blood pressure, pulse rate, blood flow velocity and skin conditions of a user, using advanced laser speckle interferometric methodology. The portable/mobile devices that may use this new methodology include Galaxy smartphones and tablets in addition to Galaxy Gear. The patent filing reveals that Samsung acquired three of the patents behind this invention from Russian developers.

Samsung is all too aware of the unrest with their shareholders of late who are demanding the company make products to better compete with Apple and Chinese competitors while pushing them to do a better job in developing software that matters to consumers and IT departments.

Samsung aggressively acquiring these new laser speckle interferometric related patents would strongly suggest that they're aiming to get the leap on Apple in the area of health and fitness apps. To learn more about this invention, see our Patently Mobile report.

About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Comments are reviewed daily from 4am to 6pm PST and sporadically over the weekend.