Sources: Apple has hired a small team of biomedical engineers to develop non-invasive sensors to monitor blood sugar levels; efforts have been going on 5+ years
- Apple has a secret group of biomedical engineers developing sensors to monitor blood sugar levels, sources tell CNBC
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 report is the opening entry in what became one of Apple's longest-running secrets: a small biomedical engineering team building sensors to read blood sugar without breaking the skin. Follow-up coverage shows the effort never stalled — Apple later ran feasibility trials at clinical sites across the Bay Area, and Bloomberg's 2023 reporting traced the work into the Exploratory Design Group, the Alphabet X-style unit behind some of the iPhone's chip and battery technology.
First-order effects
- The hire signals Apple is pursuing glucose monitoring as in-house silicon-and-sensor hardware rather than a partner integration, keeping the most valuable piece of the health stack proprietary.
- It extends Apple's health push beyond software: alongside the sensor work, Apple has since explored pulling lab blood-work data into the iPhone via Health Gorilla and tested a prediabetes management app, building the software layer a glucose feature would need.
Second-order effects
- If the sensors reach product, makers of conventional continuous glucose monitors face a competitor whose distribution is hundreds of millions of wrists already wearing the device — pricing and prescription models become the battleground.
- Clinical validation requirements would push Apple deeper into regulated-device territory, forcing it to stand up trial infrastructure like the Bay Area clinical sites already used for feasibility testing.
Third-order effects
- A working noninvasive glucose sensor would mark the point where consumer wearables cross from wellness tracking into diagnostic medicine, pulling consumer-tech companies into FDA-grade validation cycles as a permanent operating cost.
- The multi-year skunkworks structure — a Jobs-era project sheltered inside an exploratory group — points to a model where breakthrough health hardware is developed off the public roadmap and shipped only when clinical accuracy is proven, however long that takes.
The trend: Consumer tech companies are absorbing regulated medical diagnostics into their hardware roadmaps through decade-scale secret programs, with Apple's glucose effort the clearest test of whether wearables can replace invasive monitoring.