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It is rumored that Apple’s next Apple Watch Series 7 (tentative) and Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 (tentative) will both have non-invasive blood glucose measurement capabilities.
According to South Korean electronics media ET News, Samsung is preparing to unveil three wrist wearable devices at the Galaxy Unpacked event later this year. Among them, it is said that a blood glucose measurement function will be added to the model called “Galaxy Watch 4” or “Galaxy Watch Active 3”.
Until now, it was necessary to collect blood by puncture to measure the amount of glucose in the blood, and diabetic patients complained of the pain and inconvenience of sticking a needle into the skin many times a day. Therefore, in recent years, devices that measure blood glucose levels without producing blood have been developed, but they have not yet been put into practical use due to problems such as accuracy.
Therefore, Samsung is working on blood glucose measurement by Raman spectroscopy in cooperation with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and in January 2020, research on non-invasive blood glucose measurement technology based on Raman spectroscopy was published in the international academic journal Science Advance. The results of have been announced.
Raman spectroscopy is a technique that reveals the chemical composition of tissue (in this case, the amount of glucose in the blood) from the scattering of light generated by irradiating laser light. As a result, Samsung and MIT’s joint research team are said to have raised the accuracy of non-invasive blood glucose measurement to the highest level in the industry.
In the same article, ET News only mentions that “Apple has added bloodless (non-invasive) blood glucose measurement to this year’s Apple Watch Series 7,” and does not go into the details of the technology.
Apple is rumored to have been working on a non-invasive blood glucose metering feature since 2017, but two years later, executives only talk about the difficulty of doing it with optical sensors alone.
However, at CES 2021 earlier this year, a Japanese startup exhibited an Apple Watch-like wearable device that was equipped with a non-invasive blood glucose sensor and explained that it could measure blood glucose with high accuracy without blood sampling.
If it is a huge company, Apple, the hurdle to develop the same function by itself or in cooperation with various research institutes should not be high. However, even if it is realized, it is expected that approval as a medical device is required to submit the collected data to a medical institution and use it for medical treatment, so like the electrocardiogram application, “First in the United States, Japan in a few years later. However, it may be the flow of “starting provision”.
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