Samsung has released a host of new AI-powered features to its Galaxy Watch lineup in 2026, including several new health-focused updates. The new features are expected to arrive on Galaxy Watches starting June 8, and Samsung says they will help turn your smartwatch into a “proactive and intelligent health partner.” It will achieve this goal by making more health data available to you while using AI to help you collect, sort and break down exactly what all that information means.
Each of these new features seems to aim to tell the story of your body’s ongoing health with more fluidity and personalization. Samsung says it will launch the latest Galaxy Watch first, with older models like the Galaxy Watch 8 Classic getting features later. These new features are all part of Samsung’s attempts to expand what you rely on your Galaxy Watch and the Galaxy platform as a whole to accomplish. In addition to these new features, Samsung also recently began testing a new way to use Galaxy Watches to help prevent muscle loss from GLP-1.
Vitality
One of the first new features Samsung wants to add to your Galaxy Watch is an overview of your body’s vital information. The system already does this with some of the health metrics your body puts out to track your daily energy score. However, according to Samsung’s presentation of the Galaxy Watch’s upcoming features, it will soon begin tracking at least five important “nighttime biosignals,” including heart rate, respiratory rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, and skin temperature. It will then compare the measured numbers to a standard resting baseline to provide insight into your vital signs.
Samsung says this feature should give you a better understanding of the signals your body emits. In turn, this should allow you to spot significant changes from the norm, which should give you some insight into when your body might be struggling for whatever reason. The most important thing here is that Samsung doesn’t want the overview of your vitals to lend to alert fatigue. So it appears that the system will also use AI to determine when notifications should be sent and when they should be ignored.
Daily cardio load
The new Daily Cardio Load feature is designed to help anyone trying to push themselves during cardio and aerobic exercise. The idea behind this, according to Samsung, is to simplify training your cardiovascular system and reduce the risk of injury. To do this, the system measures the cardiovascular tension accumulated by your body, then calculates your maximum daily load and your training capacity.
From there, AI will help you set optimal goals for your training and distribute necessary rest periods. This should help ensure that your body doesn’t tire too quickly or become overworked from the training you’re putting it through. Based on the images we’ve seen of these changes so far, it looks like Samsung will even break this information down into a handy graph, letting you take a quick look at your workouts for the day. This should help you keep track of what you’ve done and what you might still want to do to keep up with your training.
Heart Health Score
Samsung says this third feature is more focused on improving your long-term well-being by helping you focus on the current state of your heart health. This feature builds on Samsung’s previously introduced Vascular Load feature, transforming it into a single daily measurement that provides deeper insights into the data covered by Vascular Load. The metric will be measured based on your sleep, activity, and stress levels, and will be combined with your body composition data to provide you with a useful metric to track.
The whole point of this new feature is to help you create a unified score that you can use to identify your healthy and unhealthy habits. This way you can quickly see what is affecting your long-term health. Like many other features on this list, this one is designed to help you track the current state of your body and what’s affecting it. Other smartwatches, like the Apple Watch, can also track similar heart-focused metrics, as well as health metrics you might not have known existed.
Fitness Index and more
Your Samsung Watch can already do a lot of things, but once these new features arrive, you’ll also be able to track a new metric called Fitness Index. This particular metric looks at your various exercise routines and analyzes heart rate, VO2 max (which Samsung says is a “key metric of aerobic fitness”) and even your daily steps. It will then analyze this data against that of your peers, allowing the system to clearly identify physical weaknesses and strengths so you know what to focus on to improve.
Fitness Index, along with the rest of this list, is part of Samsung’s attempt to make Samsung Health a more personal experience. By providing all these details, it should be much easier to track your health with your Samsung Galaxy Watch. Other less-highlighted features of the Galaxy Watch include a new Antioxidant Index, which will provide a new map of your body’s ongoing nutritional intake, as well as a new AGE Index to provide a longer-term picture of how your lifestyle choices are affecting your body, both positively and negatively.
