Apple continues hiring raid on medical sensor field as it develops eye scanning technology
Apple is moving to expand its personnel working on wearable computers and medical-sensor-laden devices by hiring more scientists and specialists in the medical sensor field.
Context & Ripple Effects
For a hiring item, this story traveled unusually far — Re/code, Forbes, MacRumors, iMore, SlashGear and PhoneArena all picked it up on or about January 18, 2014 — because a recruiting spree reads as a proxy for hardware Apple has not announced. The two confirmed threads here are expanded hiring of scientists and specialists in the medical sensor field for wearable computers and sensor-laden devices, and development of eye scanning technology as part of that effort.
The timing matters: it lands in the same news week as Apple's long-awaited [[a:none|China Mobile distribution deal]] signed in December and a patent filing detailing a secure touchless e-wallet strategy disclosed on January 17. Read together, the sensor hiring and the eye-scanning work sit next to a payments filing that implies biometric authentication is one near-term destination for whatever Apple's optical sensing produces.
First-order effects
- Apple's wearable and health-device team gains biomedical and optical-sensor specialists directly from the medical sensor field, expanding capacity on an unannounced product line while the eye-scanning program advances under confirmed development.
- Specialists in medical sensing now face Apple as a competing employer, with consumer-tech compensation and scale bidding against traditional medical device employers for the same people.
Second-order effects
- Eye scanning dovetails with the touchless e-wallet patent filing Apple disclosed the day before this report, pointing authentication toward the same optical-sensing stack and tightening the link between the health-device team and Apple's payments ambitions.
- Optical and eye-tracking component suppliers gain a prospective high-volume customer as Apple builds sensing hardware in-house rather than licensing finished modules.
Third-order effects
- If consumer platforms keep absorbing biomedical talent, sensor expertise consolidates inside a few large electronics companies instead of the medical device industry that trained it.
- Consumer wearables that measure the body drift toward regulated medical territory, making clinical validation and health-agency scrutiny a structural cost of the category rather than an exception.
The trend: Consumer electronics platforms are pulling biomedical and optical-sensing capability in-house, shifting wearable health technology out of the medical device industry and toward phone-and-wrist device makers.