Tim Cook is always looking for ways Apple can push the envelope with its devices. Now, it looks like the Apple Watch will be the testing ground for its newest venture.
Apple Is Good For Your Health
During a visit to the Apple Campus on Thursday, May 18, CNBC reported seeing the Apple CEO sporting a prototype device designed to track his blood sugar. The new tech worked in tandem with the Apple Watch he had on to track his glucose levels.
This comes on the heels of another report from April, where it was revealed that the company had brought on a team of biomedical engineers to work out of an office on Palo Alto, away from the company's headquarters.
The original idea behind this project came from the late founder, Steve Jobs, who wanted the company to find a noninvasive way of tracking blood sugar levels. It is meant as a program for people with, or at risk for, diabetes.
This is not the first time Tim Cook has teased such a device, talking about it to a class at the University of Glasgow in February. He told them he had been wearing a glucose tracker for some time, only taking it off because of the trip. He didn't say if it had been an Apple prototype or had come from a medical tech company they had contracted for it.
Better, Stronger, Healthier
The idea of a noninvasive glucose tracker has long been considered the holy grail in the field of medical tech and sciences. Right now, all major trackers on the market have to pierce the skin, getting a very tiny blood sample to check blood sugar. Taking that out of the equation simpifies the whole process, and could make trackers more widely available to those who, as mentioned earlier, are either living with diabetes or are at risk for developing it.
This isn't actually new for Apple, the the company investing and researching into this sort of tool for the last five years. On top of that, Apple has aggressively acquired several companies in the field of medical technology and sciences. It is believed that many of these companies were added to the team in Palo Alto.
Jobs' hope with this technology was a series of devices that monitored not just blood sugar, but other important vital signs like heart rate and oxygen levels. The heart rate feature has come to pass, and is now a fairly common feature on most smartwatches. A glucose tracker would be a significant addition to the Apple Watch, and it's not hard to imagine the financial rewards Apple would reap if it becomes the first to market such a feature/device.
