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Apple is about to release sleep apnea detection support for Apple Watch users with watchOS 11.1. However, that isn’t the only health feature the company has worked on in the past year. According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, the company tested a blood-sugar app to help people with prediabetes manage their food intake and make lifestyle changes.
This top-secret project was held with select employees with prediabetic diagnoses early this year. Even though Apple doesn’t plan to release this app to the public, it still wants to integrate this technology into future health products, including a non-invasive glucose tracker it’s been developing for over a decade.
The journalist said the app’s idea was to “show consumers how certain foods can affect blood sugar.” After all, the study was intended to “explore the possible uses for blood-sugar data and what tools the company could potentially create for consumers.”
Gurman says Apple has paused tests on this program as the company is focusing on other health features.
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In a previous report, the journalist said that a blood glucose sensor was still years away from being released. At the time, he explained that Apple might use short-wave infrared absorption spectroscopy for the blood glucose sensor for a future Apple Watch.
“This technique involves shining lasers through the skin into the interstitial fluid between the blood vessels and the cells they serve. The intensity of the light’s reflection back, researchers have found, can be used to calculate the glucose concentration in the interstitial fluid and, by extension, in the bloodstream — and the only thing that has had to penetrate the body is light,” the publication explains.
However, since a non-invasive system needs to see through a wide range of skin tones and analyze various blood types, Apple still struggles to get all the data it needs. The company plans to use AI to sift the raw data and generate a prediction for when a person may develop diabetes.
