Accessing PPG data through the Samsung Health Sensor SDK v1.3.0

Samsung Health
1

I’ve been experimenting with receiving PPG data from a Galaxy Watch 5 (Wear OS v4.0). While reading the 22nd August 2024 v1.3.0 release notes it says that the PPG_GREEN, PPG_IR & PPG_RED sensors have been depreciated and that I now should use either PPG_CONTINUOUS or PPG_ON_DEMAND. This is where things don’t match with my watch.

In developer mode I check for the BODY_SENSORS & ACTIVITY_RECOGNITION permissions before creating a HealthTrackingService instance connected to my listener. The listener gets called and onConnectionSuccess it retrieves a list of available sensors through my HealthTrackerService instance by retrieving the trackingCapability.supportHealthTrackerTypes property. I initially looked for the PPG_CONTINUOUS sensor being available but when I realised it wasn’t there I looked again to find the only PPG sensors available were PPG_GREEN, PPG_IR & PPG_RED, the sensors that had been depreciated. In the list there were other CONTINUOUS and ON_DEMAND sensors just not the PPG sensors.

As the depreciated sensors were still available I connected my my event listener to the PPG_GREEN sensor and onDataReceived I was able to retrieve values using the ValueKey.PpgGreenSet.STATUS and ValueKey.PpgGreenSet.PPG_GREEN values (both of which are also depreciated) to bring back data.

My questions are will the PPG sensors ever be updated to use the CONTINUOUS and ON_DEMAND version on my Galaxy Watch 5 (I have applied all updates available) or is the advice to still use the depreciated sensors? Also could you provide what the PPG Green value that is returned represents. I’ve looked across the documentation and cannot find a description or unit of measure that is associated with.

Thanks,

Robert Bilsland.

2

Hi Robert
Recently I made a PPG data capture App on Watch 7 with sensor SDK v1.3.0. It seems you have to pass 2 parameters to make it work, for example:

healthTrackingService.getHealthTracker(HealthTrackerType.PPG_ON_DEMAND, setOf(PpgType.GREEN))

Hope it is helpful to you.

Bangfu Tao

3

Hi Bangfu,

Thanks for the pointers but unfortunately it looks to be a difference between the Watch 7 and the Watch 5. I did give your suggestion another go (I had tried this before) but without success. It would appear that for the Watch 5 while having the PPG_GREEN, PPG_IR & PPG_RED sensors available it does not currently have the PPG_CONTINUOUS or PPG_ON_DEMAND sensors.

Here’s hoping for a future update that implements these sensors and for the time being I’ll continue using the depreciated sensors instead.

Thanks,

Robert Bilsland.