Apple Watch Bands With Self-Tightening, Skin Texture Authentication, and LED Progress Bar Detailed in Patents

[Mac to the Future]

Smart outlets introduce a whole slew of "first world problems" to controlling your lights, though.
Sometimes my internet will go out. Alexa doesn't work, and smart outlets don't work.
Sometimes a smart outlet will have trouble connecting to the wifi.
And on rare occasion (because it's a software-controlled device) the smart outlet will lock up and have to be manually rebooted.

Absolutely. For at least these reasons, it’s likely that use of these products and technologies will be limited to tech savvy early adopters for quite some time. The same goes for IoT devices.

 

[MyDogPia]

My two cents, 20+ years ago I was in the diabetic study for non-invasive blood glucose testing device. The engineers were struggling to globally calibrate the device for all the different kinds of skin. Some skin is thick, thin, dark, light, hairy, smooth, thick, oily, dry, infinite combinations. I think this sensor is to help in identifying the skin to calibrate for a forthcoming non invasive blood glucose function on the watch. I’m just shooting in the dark but this is what the engineers told me 20+ years ago.

 

[Crowbot]

My two cents, 20+ years ago I was in the diabetic study for non-invasive blood glucose testing device. The engineers were struggling to globally calibrate the device for all the different kinds of skin. Some skin is thick, thin, dark, light, hairy, smooth, thick, oily, dry, infinite combinations. I think this sensor is to help in identifying the skin to calibrate for a forthcoming non invasive blood glucose function on the watch. I’m just shooting in the dark but this is what the engineers told me 20+ years ago.

I was a clinical engineering tech for 35 years. Non-invasive monitoring devices like pulse oximeters (and the yet to be developed BGM) can be a real bear to get working. As you said, skin types and blood flow are hard to adjust for, at least automatically. For years I had to remind the nurses that a pulse ox won't work through nail polish, or on patients with low blood flow in their fingers. Non-invasive BGM will happen. But I think it will be a while before it will be small enough to fit in an Apple Watch.