Apple Watch Series 7 Rumored to Feature Blood Glucose Monitoring

[Mr. Jaybear]

I'm really skeptical of a glucose-sensing Apple Watch. I can't find anything on ClinicalTrials.gov that looks like a clinical trial for a glucose-sensing Apple Watch.

 

[Davidalan]

Rockley Photonics to Deliver Glucose Monitoring for Apple Smartwatches
Rockley’s technology is up to a million times more accurate than existing LEDs in high-end smartwatches today. “Smartwatches have LEDs that shine light into your skin, monitoring the scattered light that comes back to measure your pulse and, in the high-end versions, your blood oxygen. With this market taking off, it created a new opportunity for us to exploit an idea we had many years back to create a much more powerful optical sensing chip for non-invasive biomarker monitoring. The aim of Rockley was to develop a third-generation silicon photonics process that overcame the remaining hyperscale manufacturing issues and provided a wider breadth of performance capabilities compared to current processes.”​

The Article

 

[mikemj23]

Rockley Photonics to Deliver Glucose Monitoring for Apple Smartwatches​

Rockley’s technology is up to a million times more accurate than existing LEDs in high-end smartwatches today. “Smartwatches have LEDs that shine light into your skin, monitoring the scattered light that comes back to measure your pulse and, in the high-end versions, your blood oxygen. With this market taking off, it created a new opportunity for us to exploit an idea we had many years back to create a much more powerful optical sensing chip for non-invasive biomarker monitoring. The aim of Rockley was to develop a third-generation silicon photonics process that overcame the remaining hyperscale manufacturing issues and provided a wider breadth of performance capabilities compared to current processes.”​

The Article

Thanks for sharing. CGM still seems far off in the product cycle

"It hopes this will set the scene for enabling continuous glucose monitoring, which it said is the holy grail of consumer wellness wearables. Other biomarkers it will be investigating in this device include albumin, urea, and creatinine, which through continuous monitoring can produce health trends and alerts for disease detection and management."

Seems like we are heading in the right direction though.

 

[polyphenol]

Thanks for sharing. CGM still seems far off in the product cycle

"It hopes this will set the scene for enabling continuous glucose monitoring, which it said is the holy grail of consumer wellness wearables. Other biomarkers it will be investigating in this device include albumin, urea, and creatinine, which through continuous monitoring can produce health trends and alerts for disease detection and management."

Seems like we are heading in the right direction though.

I think that we need to also look at things from the "What can we measure?" direction.

For example, if they can produce a tunable LED which operates from infra-red through visible, who knows what biologically interesting things might be detectable? Maybe that would include glucose. But it would be pretty sad to install a fixed wavelength LED which works with glucose and miss possibly dozens of other things.

 

[name99]

I think that we need to also look at things from the "What can we measure?" direction.

For example, if they can produce a tunable LED which operates from infra-red through visible, who knows what biologically interesting things might be detectable? Maybe that would include glucose. But it would be pretty sad to install a fixed wavelength LED which works with glucose and miss possibly dozens of other things.

Spoken like someone who has no idea how difficult a problem tunability is...

Seriously! Tunability for solid state lasers remains really difficult. All the current options (things like changing the temperature of the laser, or using an external cavity) suck. You can (if you are very clever) build a QCL with two or three different frequencies and select one of them as appropriate, maybe with a MEMs grating -- but those cost ~$10K each.

What is likely to be in a mass market solution will be a repurposed telecom laser (fixed frequency) with lots of smarts to try to extract a signal while using a sensor that is really inappropriate for the task. Why do it this way? Because telco lasers are really cheap, small, and low power; whereas the task-appropriate lasers (ICL or QCL) are none of those things.

Could you repurpose the smarts to test for something else? Maybe -- but I wouldn't imagine it's especially easy or that there are many molecules for which it might work. And it depends on how many telco lasers you have available (ie how many different signals you receive at different frequencies). If the system is built on, say, just two lasers, one at 1550, one at 1310, then basically you have a single data point, namely the ratio of the two scattered powers. Not much there to use to build a generic spectrometer!

There do exist microscopes that tell you (more or less) the chemical you are looking at, eg

Spero® Chemical Imaging Microscope: Real-Time QCL-IR Spectroscopy

The Spero QCL-IR microscope represents the the world’s first and highest performing wide-field spectroscopic microscopy and imaging platform based on broadly tunable mid-infrared quantum cascade laser (QCL-IR) technology.

daylightsolutions.com

and suitcase sized boxes that can do the same sort of thing in free space (wave something around and see what chemicals are nearby). But the suitcase-sized is important, and the cost is not pretty!

Even today most use cases (using large industrial equipment) look for just a few specific chemicals, using fixed wavelengths (eg something you can fly by drone over pipelines to detect gas leaks). Tunability is TOUGH!

 

[polyphenol]

Spoken like someone who has no idea how difficult a problem tunability is...

Seriously! Tunability for solid state lasers remains really difficult. All the current options (things like changing the temperature of the laser, or using an external cavity) suck. You can (if you are very clever) build a QCL with two or three different frequencies and select one of them as appropriate, maybe with a MEMs grating -- but those cost ~$10K each.

What is likely to be in a mass market solution will be a repurposed telecom laser (fixed frequency) with lots of smarts to try to extract a signal while using a sensor that is really inappropriate for the task. Why do it this way? Because telco lasers are really cheap, small, and low power; whereas the task-appropriate lasers (ICL or QCL) are none of those things.

Could you repurpose the smarts to test for something else? Maybe -- but I wouldn't imagine it's especially easy or that there are many molecules for which it might work. And it depends on how many telco lasers you have available (ie how many different signals you receive at different frequencies). If the system is built on, say, just two lasers, one at 1550, one at 1310, then basically you have a single data point, namely the ratio of the two scattered powers. Not much there to use to build a generic spectrometer!

There do exist microscopes that tell you (more or less) the chemical you are looking at, eg

Spero® Chemical Imaging Microscope: Real-Time QCL-IR Spectroscopy

The Spero QCL-IR microscope represents the the world’s first and highest performing wide-field spectroscopic microscopy and imaging platform based on broadly tunable mid-infrared quantum cascade laser (QCL-IR) technology.

daylightsolutions.com

and suitcase sized boxes that can do the same sort of thing in free space (wave something around and see what chemicals are nearby). But the suitcase-sized is important, and the cost is not pretty!

Even today most use cases (using large industrial equipment) look for just a few specific chemicals, using fixed wavelengths (eg something you can fly by drone over pipelines to detect gas leaks). Tunability is TOUGH!

If it were easy it would already have been done! Just in the past few months we have received the M1 chip, amazing 10,000 micro LED screens, and each year the Apple Watch has had enhanced capabilities. You and I might not see how to do it but someone else might.

 

[name99]

If it were easy it would already have been done! Just in the past few months we have received the M1 chip, amazing 10,000 micro LED screens, and each year the Apple Watch has had enhanced capabilities. You and I might not see how to do it but someone else might.

Well, I am close friends with someone who works on this stuff as their job. So, sure, secret breakthroughs and unexpected tricks are always possible. But that's not the way I'd bet, as opposed to the summary I gave in my comment!

This is not like saying "well of course the M1 can be made 25% faster, just you and I don't know the precise details"; it's more like arguing "well of course batteries can hold 4x as much, just you and I don't know the precise details".
There is a long history of advances in both spaces (CPU design and battery design) and we all have a feel for what's possible, what's coming up, and the rate at which things advance.

 

[Zully]

It does not do this. They are using the wording blood GLUCOSE- but they mean blood OXYGEN.