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Samsung’s next-gen display can measure heart rate and blood pressure through your fingertip

Forget the smartwatch, your phone screen might soon track your vitals.

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Samsung Display Booth at Display Summit
Samsung Display

Samsung is always pushing the boundaries of what a display could do. Earlier this year, the company released its flagship Galaxy S26 Ultra with a Privacy Display that turns off wide-angle pixels, limiting the viewing angle so no one can snoop on your phone. 

Now, the company has showcased a display technology that could make your next smartphone a surprisingly capable health monitoring device. At Display Week 2026 in Los Angeles, the company unveiled its latest Sensor OLED Display, a 6.8-inch panel that integrates health sensors directly into the display itself. 

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It can measure biometric data such as heart rate and blood pressure by detecting blood flow with light emitted from the screen. You just place your finger on the display, and it does the rest.

How does it work?

The panel combines standard OLED pixels with Organic Photodiodes, all packed into a single layer. The photodiodes detect the light reflected back from your finger and use it to read your vitals. It’s similar to how some smartwatches and smart rings can use light to detect blood pressure

Getting this to work at a high resolution is genuinely difficult because the sensor pixels and display pixels have to share the same layer, but Samsung managed to push it to 500 PPI, a 33% improvement over what it showed at last year’s Display Week.

That puts it on par with the resolution you would find on a premium smartphone today. It can be a game-changer for people who prefer wearing traditional watches but still want some health tracking features.

What else is new?

The display also features Samsung’s new Flex Magic Pixel privacy technology. Unlike a regular privacy screen that blacks out completely when viewed from an angle, Flex Magic Pixel only hides the sensitive health information on screen while keeping everything else visible.

The current Privacy Display already has a feature where it can hide only sensitive notifications or a portion of the display. So it’s still to be seen what extra features this new technology can enable. 

There is no confirmed timeline for when this will make it into a consumer device, but given how far along the resolution and feature set looks, it feels closer than you might think.

Rachit Agarwal
Rachit is a seasoned tech journalist with over ten years of experience covering the consumer technology landscape.
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