As rumors about Apple's glucose tracker intensify, a look at scientific and technological challenges to non-invasive blood sugar monitoring
‘Everybody thinks they have a way to do it, and everybody, so far, has failed’ — Illustrations by James Bareham and Rosy Warren
Context & Ripple Effects
This explainer lands two weeks after CNBC reported that Apple hired a small team of biomedical engineers to work on non-invasive glucose sensors, with the effort running five-plus years, and days after follow-up reporting on feasibility trials at clinical sites across the Bay Area. The Verge's contribution is the reality check: per its sources, everyone who has attempted non-invasive blood sugar measurement has failed so far, which frames Apple's project as a science problem before it is a product problem.
The longer arc in the related coverage shows Apple treating it that way — the work later surfaced inside the secretive Exploratory Design Group, the same unit behind iPhone and Mac chip and battery technology, and by 2024 Apple had tested a prediabetes management app as a companion play while the sensor itself remained unsolved.
First-order effects
- Apple's glucose effort stays pre-product: feasibility trials at clinical sites test whether any optical or sensing approach can produce medically usable readings, meaning no near-term change for people with diabetes who still rely on existing monitoring methods.
- The reporting raises the bar on expectations — by documenting the field's repeated failures, it positions Apple's rumored tracker as unproven rather than imminent, tempering the rumor cycle around the Watch line.
Second-order effects
- If Apple ever ships a working sensor, wearable rivals and established glucose-monitoring vendors would face a consumer-tech entrant bundling continuous readings into a mass-market device, forcing responses on accuracy claims and price.
- The companion-software track already visible in the prediabetes app testing suggests Apple can monetize lifestyle-management features ahead of the hardware, building a health-data ecosystem even while the core sensor problem persists.
Third-order effects
- A solved non-invasive glucose sensor would pull consumer electronics companies into regulated medical-device territory, shifting screening and chronic-disease management from clinics toward wrist-worn hardware — contingent on a breakthrough the field has not yet produced.
- Apple's structure here — a small biomedical team, exploratory skunkworks placement, multi-year clinical trials — models how big-tech firms now absorb long-horizon medical R&D that traditional device makers struggle to fund.
The trend: Consumer electronics giants are absorbing long-horizon medical-sensing R&D, with non-invasive glucose tracking as the hardest and most consequential prize still unclaimed.