Giving diabetic people a wearable like the Apple Watch or Samsung Gear Watch, an optical sensing technology for measuring blood glucose levels, this would revolutionize how patients make informed food & medication choices by giving more people CGM or continuous glucose monitoring functionality in a platform they are already likely to wear as a fitness tracking + other function pairing to their existing smartphone platform. My goal here not to summarize the emergent research on optical blood glucose monitoring, more over to discuss the idea & the "killer app" "Blood Glucose" that would sell even more people a smartwatch! Health tracking the killer app & Apple poised to sell even more Apple Watches as they keep adding key health tracking functionality to new models!
Let us use the Apple Watch as a reference example. Since the original Series 1 Apple Watch, movement tracking, activity level, standing, pulse rate & other motion tracking metrics have been available to iPhone users via the associated iOS app - & on the Apple Watch itself.
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| Apple Watch Series 5 |
Apple Watch series 7 added blood oxygen saturation measurement functionality, which combined with breathing rate, pulse rate & motion tracking, can improve analytics for sleep & fitness levels to give more accurate information to the wearer or user of the latest Apple Watch. EKG measurement of the cardiovascular electrical signal been available to users of Apple Watch Series 5 & newer. Fall detection added to Apple Watch series 6 & 7.
Health tracking a major reason that people buy smartwatches. The mounted to the wrist skin constantly wearing pattern enables optical & electrical sensors on the back wrist facing side of the smartwatch to perform optical & bioelectrical analysis by passing electrical current into & back out of the user & using specific light frequencies from special LED + imaging or spectral sensors to read the way the light interacts with the skin, as light able to pass deeply into many of the skins layers & the way the light reflected can be detected by optical sensors that feed software data where special formula are applied to derive useful biofeedback information - about their heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, breathing rate, sleep quality & duration, activity level assessment of moving & fitness tracking & to provide information about many other health metrics- something that relies more on the app platform software of the smartwatch & its ecosystem with the smartphone- since the information ultimately has to be summarized in an intelligible way for random members of the public to understand, including children & elderly people who may have very little knowledge or information about such complicated topics.
Apple uses colored rings to abstractly present a summary of activity level to Apple Watch users. Meg & I call its "Spinning up our wheels" when we are active, hiking, walking, bicycling, snowboarding, skiing, doing HIT or core exercises or stretching or weight training.
Optical Glucose Monitoring been actively developed as a technology for more than 15 years because it offers a non-invasive way to help a diabetic person understand their constantly changing blood glucose levels. Diabetics who are insulin dependent can derive a relationship between how many carbohydrate calories they are eating & how much short acting or long acting insulin to take, how many units to inject. Each persons body responds to the insulin slightly differently, so giving patients a real time blood glucose monitoring platform enables them to make constantly informed dosing choices that reduce the chances of having a dangerous low blood sugar event catastrophe or a toxic high blood glucose level that raises their A1C or blood glucose oxidation levels.
Blood pressure would be another cool application, if an optical blood pressure sensor technology developed. Combining pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation, breathing rate, activity tracking, sleep tracking, perhaps hydration tracking, the more channels of information provided, the more the "Health" app can help the patient by combining all of this biodata into an analytics platform with colorful easy to understand graphics & clearly intelligible titles with fast access to expanded definitions of increasing depth if the user wants to learn more or dig deeper into information about the health that the sensor package & app ecosystem can provide. Health tracking the ultimate smartphone App & as it improves, it will sell more smartwatches to more people. This goes much deeper than just telling time, its another level of applied artificial intelligence to signal analysis & the automatic generation of summaries & insight by the software as presented in clear intelligible reports with simple language & graphics to the patient or user or their doctors or health practitioners
As far back at 2011 Meg & I were wearing "Fitbits" for fitness tracking. Before that I was even wearing a chest strap heart rate monitor that paired to a digital watch, as far back as 2004. I wore it while hiking to track my heart beat rate from my wrist. The Fitbit models were cool & had a good sleep tracking app system, but the pin based charging system was prone to clogging & I got a lot of skin rash issues because of the kinds of polymer non breathing straps.
My last Fitbit was a Surge & I thought it was cool, but the battery faded relatively quickly & Fitbits only solution was to exchange it with a new one - this is when I decided that Fitbit seems to be making single use e-waste & that I did not want to use Fitbit's anymore. That's when I got my first Apple Watch, a Series 1 model in sport aluminum (base) configuration. 2015 brought the Apple Watch Series 5 & Meg' started wearing the Series 1. In 2020 Meg got me the Apple Watch SE, so the Series 5 now her daily. We both have iPhones, a 12 mini in her case & a 2020 SE2 my daily. We both previously utilized OG iPhone SE as our smartphones.
Fitness tracking was always the main attraction of wearables. I am a technological enthusiast or consumer electronics evangelist & love applied technology of all kinds & am eager to see how "Health" tracking functions improve future smartwatch models, especially Apple Watches. I am hoping for longer battery life, faster charging & more health metric feedback, especially better sleep tracking!
This morning I swapped out the battery in the Samsung Gear S3 Frontier that belonged to my late brother in law Drake. The $15 kit from Amazon / I made a fast Tik-Tok style YouTube video about this battery change / Samsung Gear S3 Frontier Battery Change (Tik-Tok style) fast edit ~1min in 4K UHD / short clip
None of our Apple Watches or old Fitbits or this Samsung Gear S3 offer blood glucose functionality, the one health tracking app that Meg & I both really want as diabetic people. I am type 2 diabetic & Meg is Type 1. She uses a Dexcom G6 CGM system with her iPhone as the information display & insulin injections to manage her diabetes. I use metformin & diet modification & exercise + blood stick / prick blood droplet test strip glucometer measurement to measuring my fasting morning BG & at home kit from Amazon A1C testing to keep an eye on my Type 2 diabetes. I also have high blood pressure, so I monitor that with an arm & wrist blood pressure cuff meters & take lisinopril an ACE inhibitor to lower my blood pressure & it seems to work great - now to 110 / 70 now :) My fasting morning glucose levels are between 79 & 105, depending on how late I ate dinner & what I ate for dinner the night before.
Getting Health data from my iPhone, from data collected by my Apple Watch, really informative & helps me stay more active by encouraging me to move more. Ironically, I am also better at taking time to rest, going to bed earlier & waking up earlier & staying more hydrated & mindful of being peaceful because of useful feedback from my Apple Watches, over the last several years! The Apple Watch SE the 3rd Apple Watch I have worn daily for health tracking - its also cool to take phone calls & text message from the wrist, like fictional movie characters such as Dick Tracy (a tough intelligent police officer) // for example! The Apple Watch has so many functions its hard to believe. I get twitter updates & all sorts of other NEWS & weather & fitness tracking & it even tells me the date & time of day like most of my analog self winding mechanical watches, when they are wound up & calibrated lol :P
Using myself as an example. I am super excited for an Apple Watch with glucose tracking - its not just me either. Market analytics on wearables, show that Apple Watch the best selling wearable & that Apple will sell even more, faster to more people when they ship an Apple Watch with blood glucose measuring functionality. I believe Apple can double or triple or even quadruple sales of the Apple Watch by incorporating optical blood glucose tracking as a killer feature, one that will drive sales to new amazing levels & produce enormous revenue streams too Apple & its suppliers & ODM's! TSMC for example will make even more money making those custom Apple silicon chips in the next generation iPhones & Apple Watches & now even iMac // Apple Silicon emergent as an energy efficient powerful alternative to what Intel was producing in the past. I hope Apple works with NVIDA to bring real gaming power to iMac with powerful discrete graphics that work with Steam Games that are updated or new or recent titles! I played as little CS:GO offline with bots for 2 rounds this morning, on my ASUS gaming laptop // early in the morning! Right before making that YouTube video referenced earlier in this post :)
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