Forget Apple Watch: Fitbit Could Beat Apple To Game-Changing New Feature
Will a future Fitbit measure blood pressure?
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February 25 update below. This post was first published on February 22.
How’s your blood pressure? If you want to check it, you need a blood pressure cuff. While there are several smartwatches which can measure this, most notably Samsung, almost all need you to calibrate your blood pressure once a month with a standalone cuff. Swiss company Aktiia has a clever device that measures it in the background (avoiding white coat syndrome) but you still need to check it against a cuff every 30 days. Aktiia supplies a wireless-enabled cuff with the Aktiia band.
February 25 update. Well, Fitbit may be able to measure blood pressure before Apple Watch, but it’s just one of several health metrics Apple is trying to evaluate. This week brought news of another of them, arguably harder to attain than blood pressure: non-invasive glucose monitoring.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple has hit “major milestones recently” in developing a way to measure how much glucose is in a body without the need to prick the skin to reach blood.
While it’s never been publicly declared as an aspiration, I’m confident it’s something Apple is looking into, and this work—Gurman says it’s codenamed E5—looks to be moving forward apace.
Let’s not get carried away too soon. He says there’s still “years of work ahead” but Apple now feels confident it could eventually bring glucose monitoring to market, it seems.
Even so, the prospect of not needing to jab something into your skin or insert a patch into the skin that needs to be replaced every couple of weeks is a major step forward. It would benefit everyone, diabetics, pre-diabetics or everyone else who wants to keep track of an important body metric.
Gurman says Apple’s non-invasive approach will use optical absorption spectroscopy. He explains it this way: “The system uses lasers to emit specific wavelengths of light into an area below the skin where there is interstitial fluid — substances that leak out of capillaries — that can be absorbed by glucose. The light is then reflected back to the sensor in a way that indicates the concentration of glucose. An algorithm then determines a person’s blood glucose level.”
This is exciting, and it will add to the considerable health capabilities of the Watch—when it arrives.
Now, a newly revealed patent shows that Fitbit is working delivering a blood pressure monitor in a smartwatch that doesn’t need the monthly calibration.
Actually, there is one other device that does this, the Huawei D. It has a strap which inflates to measure your blood pressure. It’s clever, but not quite comfortable enough to wear every day.
Anyway, Fitbit’s new patent, spotted by GizmoChina, suggests that blood pressure tracking from nothing but a wearable is on the horizon, no cuff required. Where “a traditional blood pressure cuff works by squeezing an artery with a varying amount of pressure and ‘listening’ for the strength of the patient’s heart beating against that pressure,” as the patent says, this device works differently.
The patent shows a wearable device that has a pressure sensor in the display. The user presses the sensor with their index finger, where the radial artery is, placing it sideways on the sensor. Instructions will follow as to how much pressure should be applied and the heartbeat is measured through a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor that works optically.
This means the sensor can divine systolic and diastolic readings, which is what makes up a blood pressure measurement.
The patent says, “A user applies a variable pressure to his or her blood vessels while a PPG sensor measures the amplitude of blood volume pulses. The resulting PPG signal and associated pressure data is used to calculate blood pressure. Standard approaches to determining blood pressure from oscillometric data can be used.”
So, will Fitbit implement this before Apple gets round to it (the Cupertino giant is believed to be working on adding this capability to a future Apple Watch)? Well, it’s hard to know. First of all, deciphering accurate blood pressure information isn’t always easy, so—patent or no patent—Fitbit will have plenty of testing to do before it releases the feature in one of its wearables.
And secondly, it’s not clear how advanced Apple is in its work, though the company is known for its belief that what’s important is not do it first but do it right. But with so many companies working on simple, accurate blood pressure monitoring on the wrist, it’s beginning to feel like a case of when, not if, it will arrive.
