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Best of luck to them, noninvasive glucose monitoring is not something that has had a lack of attempts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noninvasive_glucose_monitor

But just because it might be a tough nut to crack, it isn't necessarily impossible. Interested to see how it develops.

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The article mentions that too. But if one company had the money and wanted to do the pseudo-altruistic thinking of getting it working by just throwing money at it until someone came up with a breakthrough, Apple has the money to do that.

The article is right, they could make a fortune in sales after doing it, and since I'm sure there would be a patent chances are no other smart watch company would be able to make such a thing. I'm not sure that would make up for $2 billion in research (just to make up a number); but Apple can afford it.

370 million diabetics in the world, it's also a disease of affluence [1] so they'll have money to buy an iphone and watch combo.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence

Type 2 diabetes may be, but I don't think my wallet caused my pancreas to pack in

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/04/15/too-much-animal-pro...

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/type-1/

I have to hand it to you for not even trying hard enough to read the parent's point about type 2 vs. type 1, and then linking to an article that mentions type 2 in the very first sentance.

http://www.practicaldiabetes.com/article/fat-protein-countin...

doesn't take long to make google searches.

Great, which still has nothing do with type 1 diabetes being caused by diet (or affluence). You can certainly manage weight gain or side effects in different ways, but the point still stands that Type 1 diabete is an auto-immune disease where the immune system attacks insulin producing cells in the pancreas. It is a very different disease than type 2 diabetes, where the pancreas still works, but the person has insulin resistance, and is the one people think of when they talk about diet and obesity leading to diabetes.

No amount of diet change is going to reverse the damage to the pancreas in Type 1 - it is not a "disease of affluence"

https://nutritionfacts.org/2014/07/03/how-animal-proteins-ma...

OK, so are you suggesting that a vegan diet or otherwise avoiding animal proteins will somehow prevent and/or cure juvenile diabetes then...

I give up, and suggest you learn to Google something more than just source to try to confirm (poorly!) your own biases about what diabetes is or isn't.

As a Type1, I wish they'd give them different names - diabetes is too often seen as a 'fat person disease'.

Maybe I shouldn't care, but it is upsetting to have to explain to people all the time. Even more so when they close their ears to the response.

Also consider that tech like this has applications beyond just diabetics. Glucose could be correlated with caloric intake. Tech like this could be a step toward the Apple Watch actually monitoring how much you are eating passively.

I would put money on that being the reason why Apple is developing it; not to directly help diabetics, but to add fitness features to the Apple Watch.

This reminds me of a project that Texas Instruments was working on a number of years back. They invested in and helped fund the development of a wire that could work suspended in fluids. The startup that invented it and was further developing it was doing the work to develop an optical implant that would allow the blind to see. TI didn't care about helping the blind re/gain their eye sight, they just cared about getting their hands on a wire that didn't short circuit in fluids.

Not sure whatever became of that project...

> Apple Watch actually monitoring how much you are eating passively

This is a technology grail for me. I'm for calorie counting and there's no doubt that it's integral part of weight loss. But entering all my meals in forms. Blerg. I only ever do it for a few months at a time before throwing in the towel.

wmeredith,

Have you ever heard of the HELO LX? You would find this an extremely interesting device. Wearable Technology with Life Sensing Sensors. Check out our 2 minute video at http://Farmer.Helo.Life

013a This is fantastic. The Helo LX is a device already ahead of Apple's Engineers. You can find the Helo LX at http://Farmer.Helo.Life look into who Antonio De Rosa is. In short, he is our chief designer and he was on that Apple iWatch team in 2010. We are ahead of Apple on this one. Those sensors exist today and guess who has them?! But this is great, Apple has a much bigger marketing budget than we do.

As someone knowing about blood sugar I found the lack of technical discussion around that topic surprising. Is it even possible (obviously yes?) to measure blood sugar optically? (electrically?)

Glucose is a chiral molecule, so presumably you could measure the rotation of polarised light to determine the amount of glucose.

I assume that the problem is that there is a lot of other stuff underneath our skin that interferes with the measurement.

I always wondered if it was possible to use the iPhone's camera & flash to measure the shift in the apparent color of blood seen by pressing the camera onto a finger, caused by the slight change in refractive index from increased blood-sugar.

In a watch form factor, it would be dramatically less intrusive to an individual's daily life.

With automatic periodical measurements, data logs and trends, food intake recommendations, alerts and notifications, and so on, management of the disease would be quite effortless.

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