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Who Was First: Samsung or Apple?

20:06 07 окт 2025. 21691Читайте на: УКР РУС

How Innovators from Ukraine Found Themselves at the Center of the Global Smart Ring Race

The years 2023–2024 became a turning point for wearable electronics. Until recently, smart rings were seen as a niche curiosity for enthusiasts, but by mid-2024, they had suddenly entered the spotlight. People had grown tired of bulky fitness trackers and smartwatches, and the industry responded with a new form factor — a compact device worn on the finger, capable of monitoring health and assisting in everyday life.

In July 2024, Samsung introduced the Galaxy Ring. At the same time, the Galaxy Watch 7 and the new ring debuted a feature called Energy Score — a measure of the body’s “readiness” for exertion, calculated using heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and other parameters. This release impressed not only users but also the press: it was the moment when smart rings stopped being a niche product and became a mainstream trend.

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All eyes then turned to Apple. For years, rumors had swirled around the so-called “Apple Ring.” Each new patent application fueled speculation, but no actual device appeared. When Samsung finally brought a product to market, analysts and journalists once again examined Apple’s patent filings to guess what the company might be planning. Yet this analysis had a byproduct: in the process, attention shifted to other inventors whose patents were cited in Apple’s documents — including those of Ukrainian-born innovator Natalya Segal.

Screenshots from the Google Patents database show that her inventions were explicitly cited in Apple’s applications. One patent dealt with wearable devices and biometric authentication — the very ideas that underpin today’s smart rings. Another covered the concept of smart glasses that could clearly signal when recording was active, thereby solving the problem of social awkwardness associated with wearing camera-equipped glasses. These solutions were significant enough that Apple included them in its patent ecosystem.

Natalya Segal’s career has always been about standing at the frontier of technology. She began at Zoran, a pioneer in semiconductors and multimedia solutions for mobile devices, just as the world stood on the threshold of the smartphone revolution. Later, at Lucid, she worked on technologies for combining multiple GPUs and on the concept of cloud GPUs — an approach that anticipated the virtualization and distributed computing advances of the next decade. This was where the idea took shape that graphics resources could be scalable and available “on demand,” laying the foundation for future cloud services.

After that, Segal turned to her own projects and launched Sphoonx, an educational startup for children with ADHD. The applications her team created reached more than 100,000 downloads and were pre-installed on educational tablets. It was during this period that her ideas at the intersection of medicine and technology led to her victory at the prestigious Novartis Hackathon in Israel, a significant recognition of the potential of combining IT with healthcare.

Later, she worked at Amazon, where she contributed to the development of Voice Shopping systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when millions of consumers turned to voice assistants for online shopping. Her work then shifted to high-performance computing (HPC) — a field crucial for accelerating drug discovery and analyzing vast medical datasets. In this area, she contributed to the design of innovative chip architectures that aimed to push the boundaries of HPC systems. At Fairtility, she led teams developing AI systems to support IVF procedures.

Today, Segal is pursuing her PhD research in Biomedical AI, developing a method for remote monitoring of human cortical activity using optics and artificial intelligence. This project opens the door to fully non-contact brain–computer interfaces and continues the trajectory of her career — a consistent search for new solutions where the industry is only beginning to take shape.

As of today, Segal holds five granted patents, with two more pending. One of them, involving Virtual VSync and cloud GPUs, was acquired by Google. Part of her patent portfolio covers wearable devices and their interoperability — including unlocking technologies, as well as health and wellness monitoring. These inventions were cited in Apple’s patents, a recognition of their significance at the level of leading global corporations.

The story of smart rings is not just about the competition between industry giants. It is also about how innovators from Ukraine have played a pivotal role in creating technologies that millions of people use today. Samsung was the first to bring a product to market. Apple fueled interest with its patents. But the true pioneers — such as Natalya Segal — laid the foundation years ago, on which the entire industry now stands.

Image 1:

Screenshot is taken from the “cited by” section of the following patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180270638A1/en?inventor=Natalya+Segal&oq=Natalya+Segal

Cited by:

The last one is related to the idea of smart glasses being able to designate that a recording is being performed (solving awkwardness), utilizing the necessary technology for that.

Image 2: Screenshot is taken from the “cited by” section of the following patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220264302A1/en?oq=Natalya+Segal+application+number+17%2f175%2c978

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