Samsung unveiled software tools and developments aimed at digital health, smart homes, wearables and virtual reality at its Developer Conference in San Francisco.

For the health sector, Samsung announced the Samsung Digital Health (SDH) Platform and SDK to provide developers with a feature to track information on personal health, as well as the availability of an SDK for Samsung SAMIIO, a cloud-based open software platform that brings together fragmented data from a variety of sources for analysis.

“Our news highlights the exciting developments occurring at Samsung and its growing ecosystem of developers and partners, across a wide range of technologies,” said Won-Pyo Hong, president and head of Samsung Media Solutions Center.

“We remain committed to enabling developers to create innovative solutions that ultimately improve consumer lifestyles,” he added.

For connected homes, Samsung announced development tools including the beta release of the Smart Home SDK, which will let users control appliances via their Samsung Smart TV or smartphone.

The move comes after Apple used its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June to unveil its iOS 8 operating system with technology clearly aimed at making iOS devices central to healthcare and connected homes.

It announced the HealthKit API which solved the issue of health information being siloed by providing “a single place that applications contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health”.

However, apps that made use of the HealthKit API were initially pulled from the App Store after an issue with the platform was discovered.

Wearables push
Samsung also said it wants to widen the ecosystem for wearable devices through developer support across a range of wearable and VR devices.

For instance, the Gear VR Innovator Edition, powered by Oculus, merges the long-term expertise in gaming, developer community relations and virtual reality technology for a mobile virtual reality experience.

“Together, Oculus and Samsung have created an entirely unique product with the Gear VR Innovator Edition,” said Brendan Iribe, CEO at Oculus. “It’s still very early days for virtual reality as a new technology and medium, and we can’t wait to see what the community creates and shares with the world on this new platform.”

Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion earlier this year. According to the social network’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this was to enable Facebook to focus “on building the next major computing platform that will come after mobile”.