Apple Supplier Rockley Photonics Unveils Health Tracking Tech Likely to Come to Apple Watch

[coolbreeze2]

YES!!! I will be first in line to buy a watch can do all of this! I've been diabetic for most of my life and over the years I've come to hate pricking my finger multiple times per day, absolutely hate it. The new tech now-a-days doesn't require pricking but you have to insert and keep a little needle in your skin weekly then remove it and insert a new one. That's not a fan favorite either. If Apple brings this market, Apple will rack in billions and billions of dollars.

 

[IIGS User]

No body wants alcohol monitoring on an Apple Watch. If you think you do, you don't.


First:

The market for Court ordered monitoring is all ready cornered by far more entrenched players with mature technologies that are recognized by the Courts. The latest use breath sensors with facial recognition and cellular data link. So any inroads Apple would think to make into this market would be fruitless, and fraught with PR issues no one wants.

Second:

The liability is too high. "My Apple watch said I was only a .04, so I thought I could drive". All the legality aside, some ambulance chaser is going to file a class action and it'll just lead to liability issues for Apple.

Third:

How many people are going to WANT that "feature". Explain to your spouse why you turned the alcohol monitoring off when you went out after work for dinner with your co workers, or on a girls/guys weekend. If you think it's YOUR choice, well yeah. Right. It's not.

I'm not a drinking person, but a large group of the population is. The people that think they want this, don't really want it. And the people who don't want it, want nothing to do with it. It's best left out all together...

 

[JKAussieSkater]

I don't know why MacRumors keeps perpetuating the myth of non-invasive glucose monitoring. It's not a thing.

 

[incoherent_1]

I’m so excited to see how this technology leads to practical applications. Think about being sent a notification that you may have a virus or a recommendations to hydrate or eat certain foods to feel better. Mind blowing stuff.

 

[BulkSlash]

If you have to wear an ankle tag you can now just tell people you're not a criminal, you're just wearing a Rockley Photonics digital health sensor system on your foot.

 

[WeatherWeasel]

Non invasive my hiney. All of those wearable probes they show on TV for glucose monitoring, have little needles that just break the skin, they fall off and you have to buy an adhesive such as a bandaid to hold on and they are expensive. So I am to believe that this watch just sits on the skin and can determine everything such as the oxygen sensor does, without sticking a chip or anything in the skin???? I will wait on this thing

 

[DTphonehome]

I don't know why MacRumors keeps perpetuating the myth of non-invasive glucose monitoring. It's not a thing.

It's the holy grail of diabetes management. It could be possible. But doesn't seem that this would be that. The implication is glucose "trends" which isn't helpful for day-to-day management of diabetes but can be useful to know if you're going in the wrong/right direction as a pre-diabetic.

No body wants alcohol monitoring on an Apple Watch. If you think you do, you don't.


...

I do. And I think that it could be very useful. It doesn't have to give you an exact number to be useful. It doesn't have to compete with the existing court-ordered alcohol monitoring. Apple may not want to touch that market for the reasons you mentioned. But if someone goes out for drinks, it could be useful to know how fast their alcohol level was rising, so their watch could alert them before they get smashed. A lot of people have trouble moderating intake, and this could be useful to mitigate that.

 

[jicon]

Good question. I listened to the CEO earlier this year and he sounded kind of like a doofus. Apple doesn’t like CEOs talking about their products if they’re related to an Apple product. So I’m not 100% sure this is going into the Apple Watch. I was actually involved in a diabetic study 22 years ago for non-invasive blood glucose device. It’s a very very complex engineering problem. The device obviously never came to market. Fingers crossed that some sort of noninvasive blood glucose device comes to the Apple Watch. Even if it’s not FDA approved it will help improve the quality of life for type 1 diabetic‘s as well as type 2 diabetics.

I'd counter type 2 or prediabetic might work okay... type 1 all comes down to knowing an accurate number, and having ready access to the reading. What sort of MARD rating can it get? Libre and Dexcom are really, really handy. But invasive and their numbers can be far off of reality at times. If now a noninvasive option has a reading, and it is actually 60 mg/dL off, and instead of showing 30, it is showing 90... that can be a type 1 recipe for immediate trouble. The key word I read there was glucose 'trending'. Maybe that just takes the last five readings recorded over the last 30 minutes, and displays an arrow in the direction glucose has been going, without a value(?)

 

[wanha]

Translation: Even shorter battery life.

A pessimist is never disappointed.

 

[HappySponge]

Not buying an Apple Watch until it can do a colonoscopy.....😀

 

[orbital~debris]

I don't know why MacRumors keeps perpetuating the myth of non-invasive glucose monitoring. It's not a thing.

[Circa 2000] “I don’t know why MacRumors keeps perpetuating the myth of 1000 songs in your pocket. It’s not a thing.”

Until it is a thing.

 

[RalfTheDog]

I don't think glucose "trends" would be useful for diabetics as a diagnostic tool and for making on the fly adjustments to insulin dosing, but it would be very useful for the general population to see if someone is developing indicators for diabetes and intervening before they get to that point. Hydration and blood alcohol sensors are a very useful feature for wide swaths of the population.

It would be very useful to know, this food spikes your glucose by X points 10 minutes after eating. That food brings it down by Y points. If you work out for 20 minutes, this is what it does to your levels...

 

[mannyvel]

This might be how the blood pressure thing works:

https://mathcs.holycross.edu/~esoares/PhotonicsWest_2007.pdf

 

[NetMage]

Blood pressure measurement without a cuff is going to be the real game changer, if/when they finally figure out how to do it.

At least one method has already been figured out and I am disappointed Apple hasn’t implemented yet. Comparing the heart rate timing between the optical sensor and the EKG gives you a value relative to your blood pressure. Individual calibration with a known good BP value gives you a way to read actual BP with this method.
I haven’t seen anything about a purely optical BP sensor.

 

[mannyvel]

Glucose monitoring would be useful for athletes and people who are just curious about how the body works. I was doing glucose testing just to understand how glucose changes depending on whatever - types of food, mood, etc. For athletes it should be interesting as well.

 

[RalfTheDog]

At least one method has already been figured out and I am disappointed Apple hasn’t implemented yet. Comparing the heart rate timing between the optical sensor and the EKG gives you a value relative to your blood pressure. Individual calibration with a known good BP value gives you a way to read actual BP with this method.
I haven’t seen anything about a purely optical BP sensor.

You could probably measure the difference in the speed blood moves between the peak and the trough of the beat.

 

[DTphonehome]

It would be very useful to know, this food spikes your glucose by X points 10 minutes after eating. That food brings it down by Y points. If you work out for 20 minutes, this is what it does to your levels...

Right, but I doubt it would be that granular. I know nothing about this tech, but if it's "trends", it's probably measuring hemoglobin A1C levels, which would trend over the course of days or even weeks.

 

[JakubWrobel]

Features like this (along with the existing health tracking features) will make me buy the Apple Watch. Until this is implemented, however, it's a normal watch for me. Glad to see such technology is moving in the right direction.

 

[mannyvel]

I wonder how you go about calibrating the various sensors. I can't imagine doing glucose/BP without some kind of calibration step, given the variability of humanity in general.

A possible optical glucose method:

Request Rejected

From their data, they were getting numbers that were anywhere from 10% to 2% lower than a blood sample.

 

[Keymaster]

I was thinking of upgrading my Series 4 in September/October with the upcoming Series 7, but I'll probably hold off until Series 8 if this additional functionality will be present. Not sure about "...The sensor generates lasers to non-invasively probe beneath the skin..." though!

The laser is nothing to worry about, it's just light at a specific frequency that can be easily measured as a reference source. At that scale, it's a teeny, tiny laser with no power, it's not going to cut through your skin.

I know the movies make lasers look only like weapons, but they can be used in a variety of ways that don't harm people at all.

 

[Keymaster]

I wonder how you go about calibrating the various sensors. I can't imagine doing glucose/BP without some kind of calibration step, given the variability of humanity in general.

Calibration may not be necessary...if they are looking at differential measurements then all they care about is if it goes up or down too far, or too fast. They may be able to correlate that against the "average" daily glucose profile of a lot of people, so the software watches you for a while through the day and figures out how your profile compares to others, and then uses a reference. It may also allow you to input a measurement to get a more absolute reading. I don't think this is necessarily meant to replace measurements, it's just there to warn you if your glucose is going up or down in a way that looks bad...sort of like the EKG function on the Watch now.

 

[jz0309]

Odd that a supposed supplier “releases” a technology that is of interest to Apple, or maybe very unusual… at this point my guess is this is either in the AW7 or it will never make it into an Apple product…

 

[_Spinn_]

This would be amazing if this comes to the Apple Watch.

 

[JKAussieSkater]

[Circa 2000] “I don’t know why MacRumors keeps perpetuating the myth of 1000 songs in your pocket. It’s not a thing.”
Until it is a thing.

You've actually answered my question. The belief that everything is possible. However, that simply isn't so. Particularly in the case of measuring glucose concentrations in the blood stream, which is not comparable to your iPod analogy (Songs are abstract concepts that can be manifested as information, which in turn can be stored digitally, whereas glucose is a tangible molecule that actually exists and needs to be physically measured).

If this technology emerges, it would first emerge as publications from university research and make its way into hospitals years before it approaches a wristwatch. Wristwatches might even be obsolete by then.

 

[Azzin]

Glucose monitoring would be useful for athletes and people who are just curious about how the body works. I was doing glucose testing just to understand how glucose changes depending on whatever - types of food, mood, etc. For athletes it should be interesting as well.

I’ve just been diagnosed with Type 2 at 53, that info would definitely appeal to me.