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There's "medical grade" and there's "good enough." And there's "we're going to make a ton of money off of this in the consumer market because medical people are slow adopters."

The research is actually out there; I posed two above, and they're surprisingly old.

In general, medicine doesn't adopt technology; it's forced upon them unless it allows them to bill more effectively.
If you are a Type 1 diabetic making a decision on how much insulin to inject then the "good enough" is "medical grade".
 
Why hasn't Apple acquired the company yet?
Apart from numerous other factors, they're already in a definitive agreement to merge and go public.

But feel free to join me in the speculation (do note that the price didn't move at all at the news, actually even dropped a smidge) and acquire a piece yourself – SCPE is the SPAC.
 
A possible optical glucose method:

The research is actually out there; I posed two above, and they're surprisingly old.
The research of the first study you produced isn’t about glucose concentrations, which I was very specific about.

The second study is not old at all, it’s very new produced less than 5 years ago in December 2016. It uses spectroscopy as a method of determining concentrations, which indeed is an old and proven technique when in vitro (in test tubes outside the body, for others reading this).

However, as you pointed out, the deviance between invasive and non-invasive in vivo tests (on living beings, usually inside the body but this time just surrounding the finger or ear lobe) were significant. Reading the results from the tables, not a single measurement was close to being accurate, though they all matched a similar range to the actual values. The publication also mentions the difficulty in using a non invasive technique on the arm compared to the finger or ear lobes, the skin is much thicker and more difficult to penetrate with infra red light.

Ultimately, as the conclusion of the article implied, the research is incomplete and needs further investigation to improve the techniques to see if this is actually feasible… but even then, the weak accuracy might suggest this will eventually be a “finger tip” technology rather than an arm/wristwatch device. Until then, accurate technology, which is what diabetics need, doesn’t exist non-invasively.

But still, this is exciting emerging research, I’m glad you mentioned it.
 
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’m curious what gave you this impression. I don’t know much about him, other than reading about his starting a string of companies since the 80s.

The whole thing seems odd — they’re involved in self driving and wearable sensor tech, and they claim Apple is their biggest customer — and yet they go the SPAC vs IPO route. Why? Given the market for these products and amount of money floating around, why would a company like this go in that direction?
 
Alcohol, lactate & glucose. I'm not aware of any medical device currently in use, or being developed that can do any of these things accurately producing data with which you can make clinical decisions. There are some optical glucose measuring devices in the research stage I think, but their accuracy isn't great.
Continuous Lactate and Glucose (and presumably alcohol though I'm not sure about that) are able to be done fairly accurately w/ transdermal sensor arrays (somewhat less invasive than micro-needle arrays which also work). The more expansive the array the more accurate the result. We've been using a couple of these wrist wearable lactate monitors (we're looking at Lactate, exCO2 and vOX) for some studies on sauna and they have been quite accurate.

I think the big issue w/ many of these is what level of accuracy is necessary for what purpose. We have an anesthesiologist working w/ us and clearly what level of accuracy is necessary for him monitoring a patient during surgery is very different than what we need for our testing which is very different from what an elite and even amateur athlete needs (and they may need greater accuracy than we do).

A hydration monitor that tells someone that they need to drink some water likely doesn't need to be very accurate?

What level of accuracy does an athlete need for LT to know where they need to focus their training?
 
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Anaesthesiologist here.

I'm extremely doubtful these things will produce data that can be validated against lab data. If they can't, at best they're worthless, at worst they're misleading & potentially dangerous for those that trust them. It would be like determining the size of the waves in the middle of the ocean by looking at the waves on the beach.

There is precious little real data here to go by, so I'll be thrilled to be proven wrong of course!

Currently in the medical world we use no such superficial, peripheral optical sensors to detect*:
  1. Core body temperature (you need a temperature probe close to your actual 'core' - usually deep nasopharyngeal or rectal). Making assumptions about temperature drops from the core to the periphery is unacceptable.
  2. Blood pressure. Again, you can make assumptions about someones blood pressure using the pulse oximeter waveform, but it's just that... an assumption. Even a physical pressure transducer inside the radial artery at the wrist has measuring errors dependant on the transducer, positioning or anatomical & pathophysiological variables.
  3. Alcohol, lactate & glucose. I'm not aware of any medical device currently in use, or being developed that can do any of these things accurately producing data with which you can make clinical decisions. There are some optical glucose measuring devices in the research stage I think, but their accuracy isn't great.
Honestly, the game changer would be blood glucose measuring. Not because it would be a good idea in everyone's Apple Watch (I think too much data for the average punter is actually unhelpful) but for diabetics or those with impaired glucose tolerance it would be fantastic for them to have it linked to their insulin delivery devices for a truly 'digital pancreas'.

Press releases, renders & industry sponsored 'studies' mean very little when we're talking about critical health data which people use to make decisions...

* Pulse oximetry is a different beast. It's been around for 40 years and it's possible due to the very interesting differential absorption spectra of oxygenated vs deoxygenated haemoglobin at two very specific and convenient wavelengths (red & infrared). Measuring pulse alone is best done with a green wavelength as it's less prone to external interference so better for sport/movement, etc. but can still be affected by poor pulse signal and excessive movement.
Regarding core body temperature, take a look at Rockley's report yesterday on the results of their studies on measurement of core body temperature:


Also, take a look at Rockley's investor slide deck. Apple's been working with Rockley since 2017 and has spent $70M on developing their optical technologies:

 
Continuous Lactate and Glucose (and presumably alcohol though I'm not sure about that) are able to be done fairly accurately w/ transdermal sensor arrays (somewhat less invasive than micro-needle arrays which also work). The more expansive the array the more accurate the result. We've been using a couple of these wrist wearable lactate monitors (we're looking at Lactate, exCO2 and vOX) for some studies on sauna and they have been quite accurate.

I think the big issue w/ many of these is what level of accuracy is necessary for what purpose. We have an anesthesiologist working w/ us and clearly what level of accuracy is necessary for him monitoring a patient during surgery is very different than what we need for our testing which is very different from what an elite and even amateur athlete needs (and they may need greater accuracy than we do).

A hydration monitor that tells someone that they need to drink some water likely doesn't need to be very accurate?

What level of accuracy does an athlete need for LT to know where they need to focus their training?
Take a look at Rockley's investor slide deck:

 
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Regarding core body temperature, take a look at Rockley's report yesterday on the results of their studies on measurement of core body temperature

Also, take a look at Rockley's investor slide deck. Apple's been working with Rockley since 2017 and has spent $70M on developing their optical technologies

As a medical professional, I don't give much weight to studies done by the company selling the product, nor do I care for 'investor news'.

That they've spent $70M doesn't mean much to me and I sure wouldn't invest in this. As I said before, you cannot measure core body temperature by measuring skin temperature at the periphery without making many, many assumptions (which will all be wrong when it matters most).
 
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