I was thinking… with future Apple Watches rumored to get various health tracking features such as glucose monitoring, blood pressure sensing, sleep apnea monitoring, and the other possibilities, my only thought is Apple will turn all of these features into a monthly based subscription service in order to use them. What are your thoughts?
All of those features aren’t something you can put in any watch sized device right now - at least not in a way that the FDA would allow.
Apple is no doubt working on them, but they are many years away.
Looking it up, it traces back to a 2010 acquisition of a company called RareLight, and currently it is estimated (per Bloomberg and quoted here) that ‘hundreds of engineers’ are working on it.
While earlier in 2023 a ‘breakthrough’ had been talked about, it is still behind a secret development project, consuming many millions of $. And the device being worked on would be a "prototype device about the size of an iPhone that can be strapped to a person’s bicep.” So a very different thing altogether compared to the phone.
In the medical device business, plenty of existing companies for about a $10B business. Are they asleep regarding a non-invasive monitor? No way.
Still many years away…
The current tech wouldn’t fit into a watch, but they’re working on new tech to do these, mostly based on using lights/lasers that are already in the watch.
And the FDA doesn’t care how you build it, just that it works. It’s easier if you copy an existing technology because the FDA clearance is easier, but the hurdle isn’t very high for new tech in this relatively simple area, i.e., did our devices readings match the gold standard reading?
The problem is that for many of the innovations people want, you can’t just copy existing tech. Current BP measurements require a cuff, and BGM requires actual blood samples. To put either tech in a watch form-factor requires new tech to be developed, and then that new tech has to be proven to the FDA at a certain level of efficacy.
That is much easier said than done.