Apple Watch glucose sensing up to seven years away from launch

Noninvasive blood glucose monitoring on the Apple Watch is apparently far from becoming a reality, with it rumored to appear between three and seven years from now.

A moonshot technology for wearables, non-invasive blood glucose monitoring is under development at Apple. But while it has reached stages where it has shown itself to be viable, it will not be an actual Apple Watch feature for a few more years at least.

According to Mark Gurman's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Apple still "needs to perfect the algorithms and on-board sensors," such as a silicon photonics chip, to make it viable to use in the Apple Watch. This also includes shrinking it to the "size of a module that can fit in the small and thin package that is an Apple Watch."

That can take "another three to seven years at least," Gurman believes.

At the end of February, Gurman wrote about the sensor technology, with sources saying Apple had reached a proof of concept stage after 12 years of work. While functional, the technology was still too large for practical use.

Engineers are currently trying to get an iPhone-sized prototype to function on a user's leg. This is a considerable reduction in size from the previous iteration that consumed a table top, but further miniaturization is needed to get it into an Apple Watch.