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Comment by iamacyborg | Hacker News Reader

How else are they going to monitor blood glucose? Finger prick tests?

They could miniaturize a specialized spectrometer of some sort I suppose. I don't know. If I knew, I'd be doing it now - that's quite literally tens of billions of dollars that people would throw at you faster than you'd be able to catch it.

E.g. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/104/1/0...

'January 2017 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company unveiled the Changhong H2 with NIR spectrometer', not sure if this was ever released, but suggests miniature spectrometry is a thing...

Yeah, that’d be a very rewarding problem to solve.

The rumor (based on acquisitions Apple has made) is that it will be based on sweat, using sensors built into new watch bands.

I read that it would be stricly optical:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/14/apple-supplier-la...

"Rockley Photonics says that its system uses infrared spectrophotometers to detect and monitor a wider range of health issue than the green LED systems in most wrist devices."

I also remember paging through this fascinating investor presentation document from Rockley:

https://rockleyphotonics.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Rock...

HN discussion from a few months ago on this specific topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030689

Looking at Rockley stuff in particular makes me hopeful this could be solved, if it's solvable with spectrophotometry at all. I'd even be OK with something larger, perhaps ankle-worn, as long as I don't have to puncture my skin at all.

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