Apple Is Reportedly Closer To Bringing No-Prick Glucose Monitoring To the Watch 43
According to Bloomberg, Apple's quest to bring blood glucose monitoring to the Apple Watch is now at a "proof-of-concept stage." The last remaining hurdle is for it to be made smaller. Engadget reports: The technology, which uses lasers to gauge glucose concentration under the skin, was previously tabletop sized but has reportedly advanced to the point where an iPhone-sized wearable prototype is in the works. The system would not only help people with diabetes monitor their conditions, but would ideally alert people who are prediabetic, the insiders say. They could then make changes that prevent Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes.
The project has supposedly been in development for a long time. It began in 2010, when an ailing Steve Jobs had his company buy blood glucose monitoring startup RareLight. Apple is said to have kept the effort secret by operating it as a seemingly isolated firm, Avolonte Health, but folded it into a previously unknown Exploratory Design Group (XDG). CEO Tim Cook, Apple Watch hardware lead Eugene Kim and other top leaders have been involved.
Any real-world product is likely years away, according to Bloomberg. The industry also doesn't have a great track record of bringing no-prick monitors to market. In 2018, Alphabet's health subsidiary Verily scrapped plans for a smart contact lens that would have tracked glucose using tears. Even major brands with vast resources aren't guaranteed success, in other words, and it's not clear how accurate Apple's solution would be.
The project has supposedly been in development for a long time. It began in 2010, when an ailing Steve Jobs had his company buy blood glucose monitoring startup RareLight. Apple is said to have kept the effort secret by operating it as a seemingly isolated firm, Avolonte Health, but folded it into a previously unknown Exploratory Design Group (XDG). CEO Tim Cook, Apple Watch hardware lead Eugene Kim and other top leaders have been involved.
Any real-world product is likely years away, according to Bloomberg. The industry also doesn't have a great track record of bringing no-prick monitors to market. In 2018, Alphabet's health subsidiary Verily scrapped plans for a smart contact lens that would have tracked glucose using tears. Even major brands with vast resources aren't guaranteed success, in other words, and it's not clear how accurate Apple's solution would be.
Sounds awesome! (Score:3)
About time we had some watches with fricking lasers in them! Just need to also be able to turn the lasers outward so I can cut through steel bars or handcuffs Ala James Bond.
Plenty of Pricks (Score:3, Funny)
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Wear Apple watches
Wow! And here I thought people put them on their wrists.
Re: Plenty of Pricks (Score:2)
There are plenty more pricks who loath people for their purchasing decisions on slashdot.
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Back at Apple HQ ... :-)
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Confucius say, prick who wear Apple watch strap on tiny clock.
"Any real-world product is likely years away" (Score:5, Informative)
I've been idly watching this research space since I got Type 1 diabetes a couple of decades ago. As I understand it, the main problem is the low signal-to-noise ratio, caused by a low concentration of glucose in the blood (a few grams in total, dissolved in a few kilograms of blood). You can use basically the same technique to measure the sweetness of fruit, but that works much better in practise because there's a lot more sugar to work with in an apple or a tomato than there is in blood, raising the signal-to-noise ratio. Seeing the spectrographic signal of glucose in blood is possible, but in the past at least it has required things like large super-cooled sensors. "Any real-world product is likely years away" suggests that they're still struggling with that problem.
Sensors that use enzymes to convert glucose to hydrogen peroxide, which produces a much easier-to-detect-over-the-noise electrical signal, will probably be with us for a while yet.
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I have often thought that getting a drop-of-blood device working first would make the most sense, since it would eliminate the noise introduced by skin, muscle, bone, etc., while also saving the average T1D (or their insurance company) a couple of thousand dollars a year in disposable test strips. Prick my finger, shine a light on it, get a reading, wipe it off, nothing to buy or throw away after the initial purchase of the machine.
It wouldn't be easy, of course, since blood by itself is pretty complicat
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Been keeping an eye on this tech for the pass few years as well. I recall some rumours about Samsung working on something similar as well.
I know a few people who have been using Abbott's Freestyle Libre for pass few years. Something like this may be better for them in the long run.
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Those are all good points. I was reading a recent review paper last night to get myself back up to speed (A review of optical methods for continuous glucose monitoring [PDF] [academia.edu]), and they add even more challenges to the list:
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Even the minimally invasive monitoring technologies require calibration checks, some daily, using conventional means.
Even conventional consumer glucose monitors can give wide ranging results. It is just that those results have to be not too wide ranging. You once could buy a glucose monitor that also measured iron levels. Very useful. But not all that accurate.
The benefit of any non invasive monitoring is going to
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The single hardest hurdle in the USA is the useless bureaucracy known as the FDA. They used to ensure medical device and medication safety, but now they exist only to gatekeep new competitors out of the healthcare industry. Companies like Pfizer get instant FDA approval for anything they want (Bivalent boo$ters, lol) but a company like Apple trying to muscle in on the medical device turf will be buried for years in requirements.
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Next month it will be 21 years since I was diagnosed with Type II, and I'm now considered to have LADA, meaning insulin dependent. I'll agree that the first few fingersticks were hard, but I soon worked out a regular pattern of which finger to use each time and that it was best to use the side of the finger to get the least painful sticks so that by now, it's just routine and No Big Deal. Having to us
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The technology is amazing. I use the Libre3 device, which is the size of an American nickel
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In my case, I figure that if it's that good, the VA will offer it to me. As they provide all of my diabetes meds and supplies for free (service connected) I'll go with what they offer. Glad, however, to hear that it works well for you.
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White noise is easy. The problem is the million edge cases of people outside of the norm which give false readings, not noisy readings. They don't have to detect glucose in normal people, they have to detect it in people with ketosis, with people with slight hypoxia etc. Because it's a highly indirect measurement, you're going to measure a lot of orthogonal phenomena at the same time. If you throw enough redundant measuring systems at it (targeted ultrasonic combined with multiple wavelengths of laser light
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Fair point. I was using "noise" rather loosely - I wasn't so much thinking of "white noise" as of all the other things producing signals that overlap with the signal produced by glucose. And those interfering signals vary because of all the things you mention, and more.
(One of these days I really need to get myself educated in the proper terminology of signals, interference, noise, etc. But not today.)
I think (Score:2)
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Wear OS (Score:3)
Has Google announced yet that to say ahead of Apple, they're going to include "yes prick" glucose monitoring?
Person 1: "Check out my new *ow!* watch. It *ow!* has realtime *ow!* glucose monitoring!"
Person 2: "You have some blood running down your wrist. Though you should know.
Person 1: "That *ow!* happens. I hope they'll *ow!* push out a fix for it soon."
- R&D, a good investment ! - (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody asked Apple to attach a mouse to their early computers. Or include graphics, fonts, and sound in them. They thought that users might like those things, even though no other maker considered it. I like that thinking. Google, for all its evil, also tries to be a step ahead to see how it can be more useful for more people. R&D makes the world interesting and I support it by investing in Apple and their products.
Re: - R&D, a good investment ! - (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody asked Apple to attach a mouse to their early computers. Or include graphics, fonts, and sound in them. They thought that users might like those things, even though no other maker considered it.
Really? We still have people thinking Apple invented the mouse and GUI? Apple was the first with a commercially successful solution targeted at consumers, sure, but it wasn't their idea. I believe Xerox was selling a machine with a mouse 5 years before Apple, but it was not a huge success and they were not priced with consumers in mind. (Then again Apple's first attempt was also not a big success either.) Much like many of the things Apple is credited with, they didn't invent it but they found a way to make it commercially successful.
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That isn't how I read the OP at all. There is a difference between saying Apple invented those things, and saying they were one of the first to put them in a product that targeted the general public instead of academia or some niche industry use.
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"Really? We still have people thinking Apple invented the mouse and GUI?"
I see JeffOwl is new here. He doesn't remember the howls of disdain on Slashdot over the mouse. It got universal hatred here. Any attempt to make a friendly user interface was condemned. People here were hacking dBase for users because it was so unfriendly that professional help was necessary to accomplish anything. Slashdotters made their living because traditional computers were unmanageable. Thankfully, people outside Slashdot loved
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JeffOwl seems to think that someone claimed that Apple invented the mouse. Please point out where that happened, Jeff.
I already did. It is in the quote at the top of my post. Go back and read where the other post says "even though no other maker considered it." Turns out that statement is objectively false. If someone else invented it, then someone else considered doing it. Or did you think it was invented by accident? Well, not only did Xerox consider doing it, they actually did it. The logic isn't that difficult.
BTW, the mouse appeared on the Apple computer first, then Lisa, then Mac.
That is also false. Apple didn't release a peripheral for the original Apple computer. Or did you mean the App
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Xerox was leaving massive money on the table by not targeting sufficient markets, Apple was spending money to enter a profitable niche.
That's not what this is, this is a halo feature. In a highly competitive market, this would never be put in a consumer device, the added cost useful to only a small part of the consumer base would price you out of the market. This is however a barely competitive market, it's an consumer electronic ecosystem market where they are close to forming an absolute monopoly. Spendin
And in related research... (Score:2)
I wonder if we'll ever figure out a way to create a no-prick political system?
Almost everyone needs this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Almost everyone needs this (Score:2)
I'm sorry, were you intending to argue a chimp's brain is not a third the size of a human's relative to body mass? Cause then you're just wrong.
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I welcome the lasers (Score:1)
They still haven't cracked it yet? (Score:1)
I have been a Type 1 diabetic for 30 years as of this month. I've been diabetic for almost three quarters of my life.
Back in the late 90's in my "diabetic support group" in high school, our school nurse showed us an article and a study about a device on your wrist being able to read your blood glucose. The problem of course was reading through your skin effectively and it required a pretty powerful laser. The reliability of the reading was dubious at best and it was difficult to get consistent results, if a
Wish Twitter and Tesla was No-Prick (Score:2)