Samsung’s new Family Care service helps caregivers monitor loved ones

Samsung is launching a new service to help caregivers remotely monitor and assist loved ones using smart home devices. SmartThings Family Care is a free service that uses both Samsung’s SmartThings smart home platform and Galaxy smartphones to help caregivers stay connected. It first launched in Korea in June and will be available in the US on August 16th through the SmartThings app.

Family Care is similar to Amazon’s paid offering, Alexa Together, which the company quietly discontinued earlier this year. Samsung’s service leverages the smart devices in a person’s home and applies artificial intelligence to determine their daily patterns and send alerts to a caregiver if abnormalities are detected — for example, it can send a notification when there’s been activity in the morning — such as using a Galaxy phone — or if there hasn’t been.

According to a Samsung press release, the Family Care service also helps caregivers set up and receive reminders for things like checking blood pressure and taking medication and allows them to set up and manage smart home routines in their family member’s home. Samsung says the service will also let a user schedule doctor’s appointments through their Galaxy smartphone or Samsung TV (2024 models and newer). In addition, location alerts allow caregivers to receive a notification when their family member leaves or arrives at a location — helpful for making sure they made it to those appointments.

There are other features as well. Samsung says a caregiver can use Family Care to set up SmartThings automations to do things such as activate an air purifier when outdoor air quality drops, turn off an induction stove if it’s left on, or see inside the fridge to know what groceries their loved one might need — assuming they have connected Samsung appliances. It’s not clear if the service will work with any non-Samsung device connected to the SmartThings platform.

Smart home technology has a lot of potential to help the elderly age in place (live independently in their homes for longer), especially because it allows a caregiver to stay in touch digitally. However, there have been issues with current technology: connected devices can be complicated to set up, hard to maintain remotely, and don’t always perform consistently enough to rely on them. Best Buy and Amazon tried to solve these problems with paid-for services in this space: Best Buy launched Assured Living in 2017, and Amazon launched Alexa Together in 2021. Both have since been discontinued.

While Samsung’s Family Care service is free, it does require a Galaxy smartphone and relies on Samsung appliances and, presumably, a SmartThings hub. (We’ve reached out to Samsung for clarification.) All of this may be a barrier to entry for many. The company’s application of AI technology to enhance the service could help with the reliability and ease of use issues around some smart home devices, but it’s not clear exactly how AI is integrated with the service.

Family Care can be downloaded from the Life tab of the SmartThings app starting on August 16th.