Sensor OLED Displays: Smartphones Evolve into Healthcare Platforms

Display technology is evolving yet again. They’ve gone beyond just displaying images to detecting and analyzing vital signs and even diagnosing your health. Samsung Display’s paper “Sensor OLED Display-Based Mobile Cardiovascular Health Monitor” (SID 2025 Digest, Paper 80-1), presented at SID 2025, symbolizes this change. The paper introduces Sensor OLED technology, which integrates organic photodiodes (OPDs) into OLED displays at high resolution and down to the pixel level, and demonstrates the potential for smartphones to evolve into cardiovascular disease monitors and digital treatment platforms.

Traditionally, measuring biometric data has required the use of separate wearable devices or standalone sensors, but Sensor OLED is designed to simultaneously collect high-resolution image sensing and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals on the display itself, enabling fast and precise measurement of a variety of vital signs with the simple act of placing a finger on the smartphone display. It can simultaneously measure PPG signals from the left and right fingers and compare the features of the pulse waveforms to screen for cardiovascular disease with 90% accuracy, according to the paper. This method achieves similar levels of accuracy to Doppler or sphygmomanometers used in healthcare organizations but offers greater convenience in that it does not require a hospital visit or wearing any equipment.

The paper specifically focuses on the cuffless blood pressure measurement algorithm, which compares a single-point method that utilizes PPG signals from a single finger to a dual-point method that analyzes signals from both fingers together, demonstrating that both accuracy and reliability can be achieved. In a clinical trial involving 120 people and a four-week follow-up, medical device-level accuracy was achieved, and the signal loss rate was significantly reduced. As such, sensor OLED-based smartphones are expanding into mobile healthcare platforms that can analyze blood pressure, heart rate, stress, respiration rate, and even vascular structure and blood flow.

The best feature of sensor OLEDs is the interactive sensing experience. While measuring vital signs, the signal quality can be checked in real time, and users can adjust finger position or pressure on the screen to improve data accuracy. The paper defines this as ‘User Interactive Sensing’ and emphasizes its potential to evolve into a device-based solution that can replace existing complex biofeedback devices. High-resolution image-based blood flow analysis also makes it possible to visualize and measure the structure and flow of blood vessels in the finger. This technology paves the way for smartphones to replace existing hospital Doppler machines.

As such, sensor OLEDs are gaining traction as a key platform for next-generation smartphones and wearable devices because they can integrate displays and sensors into a single device, dramatically improving measurement performance while reducing the thickness and complexity of the device. In particular, its convergence with artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can be linked to a variety of digital therapeutics (DTx) services, including personalized health monitoring, early disease prediction, and telemedicine.

In the paper, the research team said that the technology is not just a technical experiment but has achieved medical device-level reliability in real-world clinical environments and has the potential for commercialization through large-scale clinical validation. This is expected to enable basic health care in areas where it is difficult to visit a hospital or where medical infrastructure is lacking.

Changho Noh, Analyst at UBI Research  (chnoh@ubiresearch.com)

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